


The Gold Coast Theater

by bopeep



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - World War II, Angst and Humor, Awesome Peggy Carter, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Catholic Steve Rogers, Golden Age Hollywood, Golf, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Stucky Big Bang 2016, The Hollywood Canteen, USO dance, sbb2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-07-29 03:08:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7667866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bopeep/pseuds/bopeep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As soldiers shuttle in and out of the Pacific theater via the golden state, Tinseltown welcomes America’s men and women in uniform with open arms to the Hollywood Canteen, where they might spend their last night on leave enjoying the hospitality of some of the silver screen’s brightest stars.</p><p>Audiences are charmed by the on-screen antics of comedy duo that is James “Bucky” Barnes, a blue-eyed charmer with a smooth baritone, and Steve Rogers, all limbs and quips as the king of fast-talking physical comedy. Off screen, however, they couldn’t be more at odds. They were childhood friends and then some, but that was before the war, and something unnameable, came between them, and no cutting room Hollywood magic could put the pieces back together again quite the same. Studio head Howard Stark, take-charge noir darling Margaret Carter, and the studio fixer Ed Jarvis take matters into their own hands; the show must go on whether Steve and Bucky come to that conclusion on their own or not!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

If it sounds too dramatic, that's because it is. It's not at all like Hollywood, but if you squint you can pretend. You can see all sorts of things in the sky at night; the stars are all out there burning whether you watch them or not. But when you take the time to really look, they shine a little brighter, and they exist for you in that moment. You can’t so much see it as feel it: reason. The Catholic church didn’t have a lot to say about the stars, the heavenly bodies, but that they served as signals and signs of something greater. This was as close to a real religious experience as Steve had ever felt: falling into the dark spaces between stars between stars between iron grates above, from the mattress dragged out to the tenement fire escape and ghosting Bucky’s hand just barely because it was too damn hot to touch anything else without second-degree burns from combined body heat in eternal, infernal July.  
  
“Don’t,” Bucky croaked.  
  
“Enjoy it while you can. When you’re a star, James Buchanan Barnes, you won’t have time to hold my hand.” Steve insisted with quiet indignance. Bucky snorted.  
  
“When _we’re_ stars,” he corrected, “I’ll hold your hand on camera in front of a million people. And they’ll send the footage all over the world, and translate translations until it doesn’t make sense, and I’ll still be up there holding your hand like a dumb sucker, and everybody’ll understand anyway.” Someone was playing a fiddle on a rooftop, or in an apartment, or on the street below; no doubt someone would shout to silence it soon but for the moment it lived outside restriction or neighborly decorum, and it was a beautiful old song with the sounds of the unsleeping city to accompany: babies, cats, drunks, restless all.  
  
“Nobody’d pay to see that picture,” Steve deadpanned. Bucky let it slide.  
  
“We’ll never find out if I die of heat exhaustion up here. There is no God in New York City tonight,” he huffed dramatically, throwing his free arm across his eyes. He lifted it only half-heartedly to add, “don’t tell my mother I said that.”  
  
"I'll have to say an extra rosary," Steve promised. And he would.  
  
"You're the only thing keeping me outta hell," Bucky sighed, something of futility there. Steve huffed.  
  
"And you're the only thing dragging me back down." That was long the punchline shared between them in light of their very obvious sinful lives in the eyes of a Sunday-centric upbringing. But it was not a night for staring down their shame. Bucky blinked sweat out of his eyes.  
  
"Couldn't possibly be hotter there than here," he said.   
  
“Stop thinking about it.” Steve nudged him, all elbows and lanky youth. “Distract yourself. In a couple hours we’ll have breakfast. I’ll just crack a few eggs on your chest and fry ‘em up in no time.” Melting, Bucky scarcely had the energy to groan.  
  
“Not helping.” Steve’s favorite brand of humor was the kind that made Bucky mad, but even he was too drained and wilting to keep it up.  
  
“Alright, alright. Think about penguins instead. Glaciers and blizzards and how we’re gonna be begging for this heat in six months, huh.” Bucky hummed appreciatively.  
  
“Tough to imagine.”  
  
“Christmas eve," Steve conjured. "Just think of that. Perfect snowfall from this same sky.”  
  
Bucky breathed out a sigh in the stagnant night but for a magical moment (delirium, or love) Steve thought he could see it crystallize in icy air. Bucky sang an untimely _O Holy Night_ to all of Brooklyn close enough to hear his angel’s voice of the night divine, and Steve shivered, for sin, error, and pining, and fell asleep in his arms with no mind to the agony of peeling themselves back from one to two separate boys when the sun rose, no mind to tomorrow, next week, next year. The year was 1935, a lean and unlucky time before Hollywood found them and painted them gold, before America adopted them as Barnes  & Rogers the comedic carefree duo, before Pearl Harbor, before the USO tour that broke them wide open in an airfield somewhere in the European theater, before they said any of the things they couldn’t unsay, saw things no man should see. The year was 1935 and Bucky went back there and wrapped himself in it when he missed that Steve Rogers the most. The promise lived there, he supposed, safe from a rumble far off and darkness even the California sun couldn’t touch. When the director called for a cut and a different, older and tired Steve was staring back at him, misunderstanding, accusing, he felt so far from the fire escape, and he worried the tie was fraying. He might forget how to get back to the place where the things that mattered were protected and easy.  
  
“Wake up, Buck. Don’t do this.” He scowled. That Brooklyn boy wasn’t there. This man wore a costume of Steve Rogers.  
  
“We don’t have time for a dozen takes, for God’s sake! There’s a war on, Barnes. Or maybe you’ve forgotten,” some barking producer, or director, or someother, called and echoed in the sound stage.  
  
He had not. It was Steve who had forgotten.  
  
Bucky took a lap. A pane of glass in a set window shattered around his fist and apparently he had done it. The wardrobe girl who patched him up told Howard Stark over the phone that he was singing Christmas songs to himself, and Steve had watched, silent as the night.

* * *

The newspaper sprawled across his desk declared the morning as September 18th, 1943, and an unusual heat could confirm. Edwin Jarvis loved his desk. It was solidly made, a nice honeyed oak with a rich autumn gleam that reminded him of his grandfather, the kind of man who preferred things sturdy but polished. Americans, Jarvis noticed, were very fond of autumn, though California did not participate. Elsewhere, one might enjoy the gradual blush of maple giving way to a deep freeze that the rest of the country seemed (especially in these times of uncertainty,) to hold up as God’s real hands at work. California, that golden state, shone like the hot sun in the hands of people like Jarvis who got up early enough to buff it clean again each morning, before any of Hollywood’s favorite children even had time to dream away last night’s gin mistakes. Unfortunate slights, he called them. Judgment crises. Studio head Howard Stark called them puzzles, and Edwin Jarvis fixed them, but not before breakfast, and not before he finished the crossword. Howard arrived meticulously on time each morning, though his manner always made any arrival seem casually late and slapdash.  
  
“Got another puzzle for ya, Ed,” he’d say as he dropped an assignment on that gleaming golden plane. That morning, it was two telegrams and a newspaper clipping. Howard looked smart for such an hour, a short wide tie and what Jarvis could only assume was a new Esquire-fit jacket.  
  
“Implying a solution,” Jarvis said as always, glancing through the steam of the morning’s second cup of tea. He penciled in a clue: P-E-N-C-H-A-N-T.  
  
“You always find one, Ed. That’s why I keep you around,” Howard smiled weakly, sinking into a chair opposite. Jarvis didn’t bother to open the telegrams just yet; they weren’t accompanied by a panic attack or a raging diatribe and therefore could wait a few precious quiet moments while his morning steeped a little stronger, while he soaked in the international news from Italy that, as usual, looked grim.  
  
“Not my winning smile?” He asked. “Have I a face for radio, Howard? I always wondered.”  
  
“Jarvis.” Howard regarded him almost lovingly. “I’d kiss that face every morning for the rest of my life if you only said yes.” Jarvis couldn’t help but smile. He’d worked for Howard Stark from the very start of the studio, brushing dust under the rug in a very roundabout manner of speaking and keeping the studio’s reputation as seemingly pristine as he possibly could. And at that, he was particularly adept. Nobody kept an actor’s nose clean, by force or by fraud, like Edwin Jarvis, professional fixer. He took a great deal of pride in it, and Howard was rightly grateful. They had a history. You could point to any suspiciously erased line in Howard Stark’s ledger and in very neat handwriting Jarvis had written over it.  
  
“You always did know how to woo me, sir.” Jarvis didn't always invite a shower of praise (unnecessary as it was with a history as rich as his and Stark's,) but liked to see the same flattering Howard usually reserved for investors and newly-hired dancers.  
  
“You’re my rock. My wizard. My raison d’etre. You’re the only one who matters on this whole lot.” Howard raked his hands over his face and Jarvis wondered with some real concern whether he’d slept recently.  
  
“Just two today, sir? Shouldn’t be worth all this buttering.”  
  
“Well.” Howard hesitated, if only for show.  
  
“What else?” Jarvis knew to ask. There was often a bonus, usually a chore.  
  
“Seeing as it’s a slow day for you---”  
  
“What else, sir.” He patted a bead of sweat from his forehead with a clean handkerchief. It returned to his pocket, crisp folds in place.  
  
“Barnes,” Howard said through tight teeth, “needs an escort to the Canteen.” Jarvis would not admit at this particular moment that he enjoyed any excuse to visit the Hollywood Canteen and pocketed his delight.  
  
“From where?”  
  
“Probably The Marksman. He’s not there yet, but as soon as they release him he’s going to need a drink.” Jarvis didn’t question it further, and scribbled the name of the bar on the news clipping.  
  
“Certainly was easier when I was just covering his tracks from Mr. Rogers’ apartment. They used to get into such convenient trouble,” he sighed, remembering.  
  
“A lot of things were easier then, Jarvis. Those were nice and easy days. Those two could make a picture from thin air," Howard said. "Make sure he’s sober on stage. Canteen’s dry as a bone and the guys don’t appreciate a wet performance, you understand.”  
  
“Business as usual, sir.” Jarvis thought to himself that it seemed to be occurring more frequently in the past month, Barnes soaking himself silly. He had an inclination as to why: Steve Rogers wanted very badly to leave the business and had made this wish known. Jarvis had not yet told his boss; he waited for a strategy, a fix, to rise to the top. Howard continued to compliment him absently:  
  
“You’re the only good man left, Jarvis.”  
  
“Barnes and Rogers are good men,” he offered. Howard loosened his tie and stretched out a kink tensing his shoulders.  
  
“Tell that to the director on _Stars & Bars._ Up to my neck in complaints about those schmucks." Howard gesticulated as such, aggressively. "I can’t get a word in with either of them and frankly I don’t have the time. The last picture---”  
  
“Did very well, sir,” Jarvis reminded him. It had; he didn’t even have to cook the books too heavily. Howard stood up to pace the office.  
  
“Yeah, but it could have done better. Ever since they got back from that tour, things have been tense, and the audiences can feel it. Hell, I can feel it, and I don’t like feeling. Check out Hedda’s hot tip.” Stark pushed the newspaper clipping closer and Jarvis picked it up.  
  
“‘ _Stark Studios’ comedic duo is back at it again in Tinseltown after a harrowing USO tour in the European theater---’”_ He glanced up at Stark, who threw up his hands in a show of eternal exasperation and continued to pace. Jarvis continued. _“‘---but the latest punchlines really pack a punch. On-screen antics of the pair that is James “Bucky” Barnes, blue-eyed charmer with that unmistakable baritone and Steve Rogers, king of the quip and fast-talking physical comedy, never fail to delight. But observers on the set of ‘Stars & Bars’ report off-screen tension and trouble in paradise - friendly fire! Could the fight be fueled by a female flame? Someone ought to ask Margaret Carter! ‘Stars & Bars’ is fast on its way to becoming ‘Spars & Scars!'..._ Terribly clever,” Jarvis said. Howard snorted.  
  
“Terribly. And if Hedda’s already gotten wind---”  
  
“---then the fire’s been putting off smoke for longer than is healthy for us, yes, I understand. I think I’ll take Miss Hopper’s advice.” Jarvis folded the paper clipping and tucked it under the telegrams. Stark didn’t follow.  
  
“Which?”  
  
“I’m certain Miss Carter will have something to say about it.” Jarvis gestured to a framed poster over his shoulder, from which Margaret Carter’s likeness stared in gorgeous black and white noir relief, artful shadows striking sharp lines across her excellent features.  
  
“That’s a fourth thing,” Howard remembered. “Get Peggy out of my hair, would you. She’s half the complaints.”  
  
“My apologies, I must have heard that incorrectly.” Jarvis inclined his head facetiously. “Is that Howard Stark asking me to quietly remove a woman? What a rare and jovial occasion.” His sarcasm wasn’t wasted; Stark had him politely break up with more fresh Hollywood faces than he could count. He had a sliding scale of difficulty from Disaffected to Disappointed to Disastrous that dictated whether he would send flowers, money, or a restraining order.  
  
“Only the three hundredth one this month, I know, Jarvis, but there’s a war on and I have to do my part, what can I say.”  
  
“Plenty, in my experience, sir.”  
  
“See, I can’t ever fire you, Jarvis. You know me too well,” Howard said with a smile, tired but true. “Your job security is air-tight.”  
  
“A blessing and a curse.” Stark was out of his office before long and Jarvis took a final peaceful sip of his morning tea, staring up still at Peggy Carter’s face on paper. Her poster lived next to the print for “Two Jerks with a Cherry,” the Cinderella-style story of two young men working in a drugstore soda fountain, the boys’ first major hit with the studio. It was a perfect recipe: plenty of physical gags for Rogers, a great introductory duet dish washing number, and one sparkling solo for Barnes to really show off his voice to an audience of swooning youngsters. The fun they had was impossibly infectious, and they riffed off of each others’ energy so seamlessly that scriptwriters didn’t bother coming to set anymore; they went off-book 95% of the time, and the improvisations were stunning. They had a magical chemistry, one that spurred many a rumour that Jarvis had to derail and debunk. He didn’t like the idea of a feud between them. It felt distinctly unnatural.  
  
So Jarvis read the two telegrams and arranged his day accordingly. He had to “creatively re-imagine” the budgets for Stark’s main stage musical flop “Wisconsin Sunrise,” (which Americans and Jarvis agreed had at least three too many ballads between plucky heroine Angie Martinelli and cows,) and arrange to erase a bit of a scandal that surfaced involving one of Stark’s leading gumshoe actors finding himself classified 4-F in spite of appearing otherwise impeccably healthy, which was also a bit of his magic at work, that the print news seemed to see through more readily than usual. After that, he had agreed to stop by the Canteen to take the week’s surplus to the bank for Ms. Bette Davis, and at that point he would have to pick James Barnes up off the floor of The Marksman and prop him up long enough to douse him in guilt and smack some daylight into him before the volunteer show at the Hollywood Canteen for servicemen. There was no way Barnes would find himself there by accident, and the band leader would be sorely wanting without his vocal styling. Would watches continue to tick in Hollywood if Edwin Jarvis weren’t there to wind them? Would bands play in tune, would any film make it to the can? He intended not to find out; he flattered himself that the whole place would fall apart. At the very, very least, a room full of men in uniform would not get to hear James Barnes sing down the moon, which was a tragedy its own. It certainly seemed like audiences may not get another chance, if Stars & Bars was going as poorly as the gossip column portended. He put his teacup on the receptionist’s desk before he left.


	2. Chapter 2

15.

“ STARS AND BARS “

 

32\. MED SHOT - JOE  
  
sitting in the barracks squad room on his bunk, writing a letter. On the west wall are two bulletin boards with announcements and maps. Joe’s eyes are full of emotion. He punctuates a line and stops to read it back. His brows furrow. JOE is a handsome American soldier, an Anybody Next Door recruit.

JOE  
_(_ reading _)_  
“...and I should die to know you wasted your beautiful heart waiting for me.   
I should crumble to dust like…” 

  
JOE wrinkles his nose; he is thinking.  
  
  

CUT TO

  
  
33\. MED SHOT - KIT  
  
The same barracks, KIT is reclining on the neighboring cot, sketching a rudimentary picture of a woman. He is not very good. Kit is Joe’s partner in crime: a smooth operator, an opposite.

KIT  
Like toast that has toasted too long.  
  
 

CUT TO

34\. WIDE SHOT - THEIR TWO BUNKS

JOE  
(writing)  
“...like toast… that has toasted…”

JOE stops writing and looks over at Kit skeptically.

JOE  
(contd)   
You come up with that yourself, Kit?

  
KIT  
Poetry is a lost art.

  
JOE  
Sure glad you found it.

16.

“ STARS AND BARS “

 

CONTD.

JOE finishes the letter and holds it up.

JOE  
(contd)  
A masterpiece. Nobody matches handwriting like I can.

 

KIT sits next to him on the bunk and snatches the letter. JOE leans back on the wall, triumphant.

JOE  
(contd)  
Careful, Kit, that’s a hot one. And Saul’s penmanship didn’t graduate the third grade.

 

CUT TO

35\. MED CLOSE SHOT - KIT

 

KIT  
(reading)  
“

My only, darling angel”--- laying it on thick, Joey.

 

CUT TO

 

36\. MED CLOSE SHOT - JOE

JOE  
If you were his girl, you’d eat it right up. Like I’m going to eat up all the chocolate Saul traded me.

 

BACK TO

 

KIT  
You and your sweet tooth, kiddo. I’d rather have his cigarettes.

KIT imitates the girl’s voice, playfully affectionate.

Why, two weeks since I heard from Sauly-bear, I’m just sick with worry.

  
  
17.

“ STARS AND BARS “

  
CONTD.

JOE  
Only happy to help, Miss Sophia Luptak. It’s my patriotic duty.

KIT  
(batting his eyes)  
If only there was some way I could thank you properly, Lieutenant.

JOE plays along. 

JOE  
Miss Luptak, decorum!

KIT  
The world is at war, Joey, now’s no time for decorum!

The boys are laughing. THUNDER OF MORTARS not too far quiets them. JOE and KIT share a look.

 

KIT  
…  
…  
…

  
JOE  
Buck?

  
  
  
“CUT, reset for the reaction shot. Barnes, I swear to god---”  
  
“Buck, you alright?”  
  
“Barnes, for Christ’s sake, the line is ‘she’ll love it.’” Bucky looked up into the light grid and stared until the colored gels burned echoes into his eyelids and he centered. Steve stepped between him and the director’s line of fire.

“He knows the line,” he insisted, but Bucky only glared at him. An assistant reset the letter with a tired grumble, and only Steve could hear him above the hum of grips, gaffers, and hands rearranging and regrouping. A middle-aged woman with a tight glare darted in to tuck a strand of Steve’s hair back in place and tug his green uniform jacket straight against his chest, though as soon as she left he shifted it back for comfort. Chester Phillips had worked with all the upstarts and divas on Howard Stark’s lot; he had something of a reputation for achieving an unparalleled quality of film at any cost, and somehow kept his actors at the height of their game. A Stark picture meant cutting-edge, but under Phillips’ direction it meant excellence. He warned Howard he didn’t want to do a comedy. _And yet,_ _here he was,_ he groused to himself at every turn, a solid two weeks behind schedule, babysitting the studio’s spoiled comedy darlings in the midst of what would look to anyone with any sense precisely like a break-up between two very handsome and aggressive clowns. The director put his fingers to his temples before letting himself bark over the din.  
  
“Boys, we don’t have time to putz around and I’m about to---” Steve cut him off, to the director’s continued fury.  
  
“I said, he knows the line! He just needs to take a breather. Right, Buck?”  
  
“Oh, that’s _rich_ ,” Bucky spat. “Hey, let’s have a rewrite of the contracts, Phillips, he knows what I _need_.” Bucky Barnes barreled through pent frustration that only just skirted the limits of his patience, blood hot and words heavy. “That’s rich, that is _rich_. Funny, Steve, I seem to remember---”  
  
“Buck, we’re not having this fight again. Just talk to me---” Steve pleaded with his eyes but Bucky was mid-spiral.  
  
“Oh! We’re not having it, I hadn’t realized. Sorry.” Bucky waved his hands and his tone took on a patronizing, childish lilt. “Sorry, everyone, I forgot Steve Rogers was calling the shots here! Hey, Phillips, I know your chair says director but Steve here kindly reminded me that he’s in charge, so we’d all better toe the line under his command. If he says jump, you say how high! If he wants to walk himself into enemy fire---”  
  
“Mr. Barnes, do you need to take a walk?” The producer on set recognized the tensions only growing, as they had several frustrating times this week, and tried to offer a break. Phillips looked more than half past done. Bucky was already unbuttoning his uniform top. The wardrobe girl hovered nervously.  
  
“Yeah, I need to take a walk, Erskine. Oh, wait. Steve, you’re making the decisions for the two of us, what do you think? Can I take a walk, sir, please?” Steve reached out to put a hand on his shoulder and Bucky jerked away, bumping the girl who was there just in time to take his costume before it hit the floor of the soundstage.  
  
“Buck, we can’t work like this!”  
  
“Then I guess _it’s not working!_ Just like you thought.” Bucky turned on his heel to the producer. “There’s my permission. I’ll take my leave.”  
  
“Barnes, we’re paying a hundred extras for the battlefield shots this afternoon. If you walk off the lot now---” Erskine wanted to be patient but Bucky was already snapped in two.  
  
“Replace me.” A star in any other shoes besides James Barnes's would never gamble with his employment so carelessly, but it happened that there was a particularly snug job security in being one half of America’s favorite comedy duo: replacement was not an option.  
  
“Lord, if only I could,” the producer grumbled, looking through the shots on the schedule for the day. Phillips gave him a look that said ‘figure it out,’ and went to talk to the camera operator. Steve closed his eyes and stood firmly rooted to his mark.  
  
“Don’t say that,” he sighed. “Nobody could. And I wouldn’t let them.”  
  
“Alright, everybody. We’re moving on to the exteriors for the day,” Erskine called and crew snapped into motion. He had a kind face but he was only human, a man with limits. He turned to Steve then, eyebrows knit. “Rogers, go home. Or go after him, I don’t care which. Do not bring this to set tomorrow. Please.”  
  
“Yes, sir.” Steve swallowed hard. “When he starts speaking to me out of costume again, I’ll let him know.” Erskine had more to say, and did not. Instead he pressed on with his challenges.  
  
"Baker." A young man in suspenders hopped to attention. “Call Stark. He’s not going to like it.”  
  
“Yes, sir.” The boy scampered off and Steve found himself alone. As usual, his mind free-associated to the first ten punchlines he could think of, a sort of security blanket when he felt vulnerable. Typically it was a defense mechanism when Bucky wasn’t there acting as a bulwark, a way of engaging the parts of his brain that were otherwise the noisiest, the saddest. These days the comebacks and quips were hostile and mean-spirited, and directed at the one person he never thought to hurt. Lord, if he could make Bucky laugh again--- but even that would not be enough. Not this time.  
________  
  
Feeling very productive by midday, Jarvis drove down Sunset whistling an idle, happy tune. He parked in the shade of an auto mechanic’s down the block from the Hollywood Canteen, not too long ago just a rundown club with little to no ambitions of stardom. Any child who’s been to a Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney picture can tell you how a barn becomes a stage: teamwork makes the dream work. It happens in the eleventh hour, like magic, and in Hollywood magic is made with a team of hard laborers and artists hiding backstage. It was much the same with the Hollywood Canteen, except those pretty faces also delivered sandwiches. It began with John Garfield and Bette Davis, who took a leaf out of New York’s book (as California is wont to do when the wind is right.) There, the Stage Door Canteen and its Broadway staff was wildly successful at showing support for the troops on leave by providing a club (and unforgettable experience with the stars of the stage) they could attend for free as a thank you for their service. Garfield and Davis thought to make a similar refuge for the boys in uniform wandering the Hollywood hills without a place to blow off steam. They came in droves, flooding in relentlessly eager like a summer downpour, and the Hollywood Canteen offered the hospitable send-off they deserved before filtering into the Pacific theater or off to training camps. Bette Davis got things done; one couldn’t help but admire her. She and a seemingly endless team of studio volunteers, carpenters and artists and electricians and teamsters, put in long and thankless hours to put the place together, and Jarvis always felt quite rightly that he was indeed walking onto a set whenever he set foot there. It was a bit of an uncanny feeling, this place that was made to look like the most welcoming dance hall Hollywood could offer, and, as it was fully staffed by an enormous roster of studio employees, bright-eyed junior hostesses, and bona fide celebrities, even the supporting cast fed the illusion. They called it the Old Barn affectionately, and it looked that way from the street; a cowboy rope twisted into a cursive sign christened it The Hollywood Canteen. A high wooden fence lined the sidewalk so guests could line up around the block, and it was covered in carved names of soldiers who had been there before. Jarvis ran his hand along it as he went past the front facade and made his way to the side door volunteer entrance, bypassing an already growing line of servicemen and women waiting to get in. The Canteen was free to all men and women serving their country; a uniform was the only price of admission. Regular folks could attend, if they really wanted, but had to pay a steep donation price for the experience of an evening with the stars and a couple thousand young men crowding the room. While it was a dry establishment, coffee and punch and sandwiches and pie and the like, as well as cigarettes and autographs, were all free. While the studios didn’t stand to gain financially, it was the cardinal American sin to shirk doing one’s part for the country, and this was one way of many Hollywood defied the idea that the city of sparkle and sin was anything less than utterly gracious and patriotic, and a key part of the war efforts on the homefront. It was crucial that the American public continue to see movies, to buy war bonds, and to keep morale high. Hollywood played a somewhat more vital role than one might expect in this, such a terrible global fray. The Hollywood Canteen was a bastion of selfless support. Jarvis rather felt American himself, pulling a shift or two behind the counters here and there on Stark Studio Saturdays.  
  
The afternoon sun was tall and focused and Jarvis had no qualms now at the thought of stealing a cool drink from the kitchen. He dabbed at a bead of sweat rolling past his temple with his handkerchief as he made his way through the bustle of preparation inside the Canteen. He checked the back office but found no one was there. On Stark Saturdays, Peggy Carter managed the house. Far from the desk, Peggy instead had her sleeves rolled tightly and her apron already smudged with pie crumbles as she prepped many plates of dessert for the evening of visitors. She was particularly lovely on screen, draped lush with sparkles and up to her elbows in perfect silken gloves, but she never shied from the dirty work of the kitchen, or any work at all for that matter. Her lips were still picture-perfect painted, no doubt Victory Red like the girls in the service, and she hummed indistinctly as she cut one of several pies in front of her on the counter.  
  
“If it isn’t England’s crown jewel,” Jarvis cooed with particular relish. Peggy looked up at him with something of a challenge. “You know, I believe cutting an apple pie is an act of treason here in the United States.” She smiled then.  
  
“Good thing I’m an import. To what do I owe the pleasure, Mr. Jarvis?” She offered him a plate of pie and though he didn’t think to want it, she was such a vision it would be a shameful impropriety to turn it away.  
  
“Is it too much to just miss you? I miss you,” he said. Peggy chuckled.  
  
“You miss England. Have you come to listen to me speak?” The pianist in the dance hall was warming up with a Chopin nocturne and Jarvis felt very homesick, very suddenly.  
  
“I do,” he admitted. They shared a moment of commiseration; the home they knew was in peril, in pain. “But we do what we must.”  
  
“Busy hands are happy hands,” Peggy sighed, looking anything but.  
  
“A dash of the old Protestant work ethic never hurt anyone,” Jarvis agreed. Peggy continued to transfer perfect wedges to white china plates.  
  
“Are you looking for the petty cash key?” Peggy asked. Jarvis nodded.  
  
“I am. Miss Davis no doubt entrusted it to you." Peggy fished it out from her apron pocket and slid it towards him. "The bank's on my way."  
  
“To what?”  
  
“To whom,” he corrected. Peggy seemed to perk at the thought. She liked knowing Jarvis’s end of the business. She enjoyed cleaning up messes and so rarely was afforded the opportunity in front of the camera.  
  
“Where’s the fire you’re putting out today, Mr. Jarvis?”  
  
“I rather think the fire’s died, and that seems to be the problem,” he said.  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“I’m to retrieve James Barnes from the floor of The Marksman, cleanse him of sin, and prop him up onstage long enough to convince everyone that things are fine.” Peggy hummed a dark disapproval. “You suspect otherwise.”  
  
“I’m not blind, Mr. Jarvis," she said curtly, slipping the knife through a new pastry. "You can see _otherwise_ all over Steve Rogers’ face.”  
  
“Howard agrees.”  
  
“Howard’s worried?” Peggy’s eyebrows twitched. “How many dollar signs are attached to that worry?”  
  
“Not nearly as many as you might think,” Jarvis said. “You don’t give him enough credit. I quite think this may be personal. Perhaps he’s going soft."  
  
“Oh, Howard.”  
  
“Oh, Howard, indeed," he said, setting down his fork. "Well, I’m sure you have to prepare for the evening.”  
  
“Lovely to see you again,” Peggy smiled up at him before returning her focus to the pie plates. But Jarvis stayed put, his pie plate empty and the piano filtering sweetly through the room underscoring what more he had to say. “You’re... still here, Mr. Jarvis.”  
  
“That seems to be the case, yes.” Peggy put down her knife and leaned close, propping on her elbows to lower her voice in conspiracy.  
  
“Did you want to talk, Ed?” Her eyes were warm and nothing patronizing lit their curiosity. Some actors, Jarvis thought, couldn't pull this off sincerely if they tried. He hated dealing with those. But Peggy rooted her every performance in her real heart. He could trust her.  
  
“I get the feeling this rift between Rogers and Barnes is one I can’t mend with force or charm.”  
  
“So what do you suppose you’ll do?” she asked, knowing.  
  
“I supposed I might ask you to help me?”   
  
“I suppose I might be a little too close to be of much good,” Peggy sighed. “They’ve known each other since the beginning, I don’t think there’s much can stand in their way. They’ll work through it eventually.”  
  
“ _Eventually_ is a luxury I worry they cannot afford,” Jarvis said. Peggy nodded. "I can’t help but feel responsible for the feud.” That caught Peggy off-guard.  
  
“You’re responsible for every good thing on the Stark lot, Edwin. Steve and James would find plenty of trouble without your intercession.” He was not reassured.  
  
“Yes, but I did prefer it when they found it together," he admitted. "Easier to keep track.”  
  
“I’ll be your eyes and ears as best I can tonight, Mr. Jarvis," Peggy offered, fixing her gaze with resolution and hoping it would be a comfort to him. "I don’t mind telling you I can’t stand seeing them this way.”  
  
“Thank you.” He pulled the cuffs of his shirtsleeves straight and headed to the safe. First, the bank. Second, Barnes. Third, conflict resolution.

* * *

Maybe Steve wouldn’t remember it in picture clarity the way Bucky did, or the way Bucky told it after his glass had been refilled one too many times, but the details haunted him in ways the alcohol could not defy, in painful shards. He recounted it, again, again, to the patient therapist that was his bartender: they’d been on a USO tour for two weeks only, only two weeks in, when they were transferring planes to visit a troop further out, he couldn’t remember which. But they were walking... Steve kept his voice low in confidence as they walked out onto the airfield. Ahead the crew and inspectors fretted about, making checks and preparations.

“Next time I come out here will be in a proper uniform,” he’d said. Bucky was looking dreamily off into the grey sky, thinking of something else, when the words hit him.  
  
“Hm?”  
  
“I’m enlisting.” Bucky stopped walking and looked at him. He exhaled a sort of laugh. "Something funny?"  
  
“We’re 4-F, Steve. We got lucky,” he said, raising his eyebrows indicatively, as luck had nothing to do with it (unless Luck was, and it wouldn’t be altogether unbelievable, Edwin Jarvis’s middle name.)  
  
“It’s borrowed time, Buck, and," Steve lowered his voice noticeably, "it's shameful. Don't you--- do you really feel okay about that?"  
  
"I feel personally blessed every morning I wake up and I'm not here," Bucky said. "Thousands of boys ain't so lucky." Bucky worried his lip, anxiety creeping like a cloud over the sun. Steve had talked a big game about civic duty, being a man, of self-sacrifice being the purest reflection of piety and patriotism and all kinds of propaganda bullshit that Bucky let slide all the time knowing Jarvis had kept them safe under his Hollywood blanket of lies. Suddenly the air seemed thick with an electricity, right before a lightning strike. Steve might not be all talk.  
  
"Well, it's killing me. God and country ask the same thing of every man. It's just--- shame. I feel ashamed."  
  
"It's guilt, you broken Catholic," Bucky sneered with a nudge, and Steve did not laugh at even the passing attempt at levity.  
  
"Fuck you. You don't know."  
  
"Is that all you're ashamed of?" He asked and Steve did not dignify it with an answer.  
  
"I know I’m supposed to be here, with them. I can’t explain it. I know it’s right.” Steve gestured all around him, to boys darting about, to the aircraft and their parts strewn about. “This is the most noble pursuit, Buck. I don’t have any right to let it just--- happen around me. I have to fight. I’m supposed to fight. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I didn’t know how to tell you. But you feel it too, I can tell. You’re on edge.” Bucky wiped a hand over his face.  
  
“Of course I’m on edge, Steve. But you’re not--- you’re not enlisting. It’s just adrenaline, or something.” To his mind, it had to be something, anything fleeting, because Steve wasn’t asking him to be part of it, to come with him. He wasn't asking for advice, or asking for a partner. He was telling him goodbye. Steve shook his head.  
  
“Buck. I mean it. I have to do it. You don’t have to agree. I don’t want you to, even. I just wanted you to know, because you’re my best friend.” Steve started walking again and Bucky had to jog a step to catch up.  
  
“Jesus. ‘ _I mean it, I have to do it,_ ’” Bucky imitated Steve’s gravity and tried to laugh to cover the fact that his throat was closing up, or stretching too wide, or the altitude was getting to him. “I’ve heard you say that a million times. No, Steve. No way. This isn't some scrapper in an alley!” He laughed, almost manic now, breathing scattered, panicked air. “We’re a _team_ , aren’t we? We’re a team.” The words were like cardboard approximations of the emotions starting to darken his periphery threatening blackout. Steve turned to study his face, and stopped again as clarity found him.  
  
“Is that why you’re upset? Oh, Buck,” he softened. “You don’t need me, Buck. You can make it on your own. You never needed me! You’re the star! I’ve been riding on your coattails since we were kids. I always felt--- I mean, you must’ve seen that. I’m in your way.” Bucky stared, his mouth swinging open and words falling out that he couldn’t even arrange. Didn’t he know?  _  
  
(Was he remembering this right? He didn't say that.  
  
Did he?  
  
He did. He sure did.)  
_  
“I’m not--- I can’t even imagine what---?” It wasn’t supposed to be a question but it was. Steve put a hand on his shoulder and it felt like a lead weight. Bucky saw something of a mask on Steve, like he’d rehearsed the words. There was nothing of his comedic spark.  
  
“Don’t be like that, don’t pull the confidence thing now. I’ve spent my life worshiping you, even in a church before God. You’ll be just fine. This is how it was always supposed to be, you shining like a star. It’s just not for me. I’m supposed to be here. It's right.” Bucky shook his head, slow and stupefied.  
  
“Are you--- that’s insane, Steve, that’s totally insane. I can’t do any of that without you.”  
  
“Yes you can. You always could!" Steve felt himself leaning in to this argument, veering hard left from his own issues, his own shames and guilts, and he didn't stop it. "This is where I belong. I just feel it, Buck. I sent a telegram to Jarvis. He’ll get my status changed when we go home. You’re the only one who’d understand why I want this. You’ve got to understand.” Steve pleaded with his eyes. “This is bigger than us.”  
  
“Yeah,” Bucky agreed. “It is. But---” The wail of sirens cut him off. They were being shuttled towards a transport vehicle; an air strike, Bucky only realized too late, when the sounds and shakes around him were so close his lungs rattled in his chest. He and Steve huddled behind the car, though it felt that danger could come from any side but most pressingly from the air above. They were ordered to stay put. Bucky held tight to Steve’s arm, close and quiet when nothing else was. The roar of it all deafened the entire field.  
  
Maybe it’s true that you only feel fear when you stand to lose something. Looking at Steve while the aftershocks of mortar fire still rang sharp and shrill in his ears Bucky was suddenly, singularly, terrified. Indistinct shouting and gunfire sparkled around them, their transport vehicle now serving as a makeshift shield. And the bewilderment and confusion that he couldn’t bear to navigate earlier turned hot and furious.  
  
“You promised you were with me--- and I--- didn’t you mean that? Any of that? Is this just some end-of-the-world kamikaze bullshit, Steve?”  
  
“What? That’s got nothing to do with--- Bucky, I thought you’d be thrilled. You never have to deal with any of those rumours again. This is what I really wanted, this is what I want!” _How could that be?_ “I’ve got to do something!” Bucky couldn’t even consider the thought presently. At the moment, Steve was wearing a soft white linen shirt and grey slacks. His hair was suddenly adrift and his blue eyes wild and Bucky couldn’t grasp a thing but that.  
  
“Goddamn it, will you look at yourself? You’re not doing anything in that outfit, we’re unarmed and unprotected. And you’re not enlisting, you’re just not, Steve. You can’t.” If his eyes watered he blamed the dust of the airfield. Steve shook him loose and crouched to move away and Bucky worried he might do something truly stupid.  
  
“You know I can! What’s the point of us, of what we are, if all this is all going on? This is happening without us, and we don’t have a right to sit here! All these boys are dying! We’re surrounded by death, we can’t just---”  
  
“Steve, goddamn it. I can’t let you. I’m not letting you. I won’t---”  
  
Bucky dove after Steve as something whistled high and silver overhead, lodging himself as forcefully as he could between danger and the only thing on the planet he could imagine fighting for. The next clear memory was a hospital cot, thick layers of damp bandages choking his left arm, and Steve Rogers glaring at him in a silence that would last all the way back to California. Every fight since ended the same way, unstoppable force meeting immovable object, and the divide grew and grew and not once did Bucky find a bridge to build at the bottom of a glass, but he kept trying. Where compassion and compromise might have been, Bucky nurtured resentment and hurt. He told this, every moment and emotion he could remember and string together, to the bartender at the Marksman.  
  
“That’s war, son,” the bartender told him, refilling his glass in sympathy. “The minute you take something for granted, they’ll snatch it right out from under you.”  
  
“What if we can’t remember how to be what we were before, Dum?” Bucky asked in a whiskey haze. The bartender huffed.  
  
“Then we have to move on.”  
  
“Mr. Barnes?” Jarvis startled Bucky from a dark place to the light and he remembered suddenly where he was.  
  
“How's life, Jarvis?” he asked, throwing back what was left of his drink.  
  
“Another day of wine and roses, Mr. Barnes,” Jarvis said with a frown, taking the seat next to his. The bartender put a glass in front of him.  
  
“What’ll it be, Ed? On the house as always,” he said with a courteous nod. Jarvis had cleaned up a mess or two in the back room of this old bar, unofficially Stark’s favorite watering hole, and Dum-Dum Dugan owed him more than whiskey could buy. Certainly Jarvis knew he could rely on him for secrecy in the matter of Barnes’s confession. The Marksman was not quite like a public house back home but Jarvis had grown fond of it no less. He looked around the tavern; today there were no women, as the reporters loved to gossip always accompanied Barnes on his benders. It was too early, perhaps, in the day.  
  
“What is Mr. Barnes having, Mr. Dugan?” Jarvis asked the bartender.  
  
“Whiskey neat,” he replied, holding up the bottle in offering. Jarvis nodded, and he poured a generous two fingers.  
  
“A contradiction in terms, don’t you think?” He sipped at it and considered what he’d heard Bucky confide. “So Steve Rogers was serious about changing his circumstances, with regard to the war effort,” he said vaguely. Bucky looked far off, mindlessly kneading at the scars on his left arm.  
  
“Dead serious. Pun intended. Ha ha."  
  
“How do you feel about that?” He watched Bucky’s face as his head lolled and slurred. Even in the amber light of the bar, his eyes were unmistakably red, rimmed with the shadow of lost sleep.  
  
“It doesn’t matter how I feel, Jarvis,” he replied. “That’s the whole of it. Doesn’t matter how angry I get or how depressed or how mean, he doesn’t care and he won’t listen. I feel selfish and stupid and like I wasted--- a whole life. God, I always thought I was a tough one. I should be pushing him out there. I don’t know what I’m doing.” Jarvis nodded, yet unsure how to respond. This was not the reason he would have predicted they were having such a hard time being together. They were scared by their own depths, and pushing each other away. The war had thrown them up against the real possibility of loss. Dum-Dum put a glass of water in front of him and Bucky took an obliging sip. “Why are you here, Ed? Did Erskine call you?”  
  
“You have a performance this evening at the Canteen,” Jarvis said. Bucky turned to him suspiciously.  
  
“Oh? You’re not here to ask me to make up with Steve Rogers, first class idiot and---”  
  
“Name-calling is surely not the first way to make up, but I'm not here to ask you that, no. Certainly that would no longer be as easy as it once seemed,” Jarvis considered. Bucky stared ahead, his eyes tracing the colored bottles lining the barback.  
  
“So you did hear it all.” Jarvis nodded and took a sip from his tumbler.  
  
“I did.”  
  
“You can’t let him, Ed. I don’t care if he never talks to me again. You’ve got the power. Promise me you won’t let him die.” Bucky’s eyes welled and through a whiskied lens Jarvis saw a much younger man, shades of a lean Brooklyn past where Steve Rogers was all he had. He nodded.  
  
“We shall neither of us let any harm come to Steve Rogers,” he promised. “Drink your water. Two thousand men in uniform need your help forgetting tonight. Talk to them. Perhaps you can reconnect to this war in a positive way. Get a grip, as Miss Carter is so fond of saying,” Jarvis said, attempting to make him smile. Bucky nodded, morose.  
  
“Get a grip,” he repeated darkly. “Great idea. Can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”  
  
It would be another hour of water and subtle persuasion, but James Barnes left The Marksman and stood up almost perfectly straight getting out of Jarvis’s car. Immediately two young ladies were there, fawning and fanning and near to faint, and he sucked in a breath of hope that the day would turn around. 


	3. Chapter 3

The Hollywood Canteen, from the inside out, was a marvel in full-swing. There had never been anything quite like it before, and there probably wouldn’t ever be again. Bucky thought that was just as well, looking out through a cloud of cigarette smoke from behind the microphone. His eyes swam over the swarm of boys on the scuffed barn floor who looked back like this night was blessed by every star in the sky ( _only the stars who were sober enough to volunteer,_ Bucky thought miserably as he sweat out the last of the whiskey, _or were dragged by their collars otherwise._ ) New York had the Stage Door and California’s Canteen followed just a hop and hope and a few time zones behind. Hell was hot and stage lights on a California night were hotter. In spite of the cooling systems, air circulated with about as much difficulty as a young starlet in the sea of soldiers; couldn’t move an inch without a new dance partner in uniform she couldn’t very well disappoint. Their numbers were near impossible to track at something like two thousand a night; if Bucky recognized a return customer he called it a miracle for more than one reason. He would sing some tune or another, they all blended together in their similar golden sentiments, but each night to a dark ceiling from an empty bed (these days) he wondered for how many it was the last song to go through their heads before a bullet.

“That’s bleak as all, JB, knock it off,” Angie said, jarring him to focus when he’d slipped back into the kitchen after his number and told her this. She was puffing some scented floral powder over her cheeks and neck, though she was sweating shadows through the flowered dress smartly covered with a blue apron. Violets, Bucky thought. Violets and smoke. “Don’t think about it like that.”  
  
“You haven’t been there, Ange. It’s hard not to.”  
  
“Well sure, I get that.” She waved his gravity away, a flick of the wrist, a fluttered lash, the practiced punctuation of glamour. “You just have to start buying what we’re selling, then, honey. It’s all we’ve got. This whole industry is about distraction,” Angie smacked her lips with a fresh coat of red. “And don’t we owe it to the country to put on a good show? Debt of gratitude.” Angie managed an immaculate reflection even here in the bustling kitchen. Bucky loosened his tie and hoped his eyes didn't betray his ugly afternoon.  
  
“We’re paying that debt with dish rags and they’re paying with lives. Doesn’t seem fair,” a girl filling coffee mugs lamented. Bucky let himself look her up, down, and sideways; she was undoubtedly a dancer. Howard had a flock of them, these pretty young dolls with legs fit for museums. Each studio had a dedicated night to serve at the Canteen (he had come to dread Stark Saturdays since returning from the Foxhole Tour,) but half the roster was a constant rotation of junior hostesses with eyes like deer uprooted from a town smaller than his old tenement, from Ohio, or Kansas, or some other flyover. Just like the boys waiting on her coffee, waiting on their maker. It sunk him heavy in his shoes. She lined the cups on a tray. “Doesn’t seem fair at all.”  
  
“Sure don’t,” Bucky said. “Neither do those gams, but we’re in the _distraction business_ , after all, sugar.” He raised his eyebrows and Angie swatted at him.  
  
“You leave my ducklings alone. Aren’t you supposed to be crooning the charm out of a snake or something?” She scowled. Bucky smirked, sobriety coming along slow and steady.  
  
“Anybody ever told you you’ve got a way with words, Angie?”  
  
“I let my eyes do the talking, soldier,” she fluttered her lashes and Bucky snorted. “And have Rogers write all my bits.” She cut her consonants with icy purpose and Bucky felt her intention. “ _Rogers_. You know, that handsome blonde guy that you suddenly can't stand?”  
  
“I’ve known Steve Rogers all my life,” Bucky spat. “Nothing _sudden_ about us.” Bucky took a mug of coffee from the girl’s tray and spun on his heel. He melted into the throngs on the floor to fraternize before his next number. The band played Blue Champagne. Angie stood at the kitchen entrance and watched him until she couldn’t find his brilliantine shine weaving through the uniforms. The dancer filled another mug to take the deserter's place.  
  
“I thought Barnes and Rogers were best friends?” she asked. Angie fluffed the girl’s curls, acorn brown and wound loose and sweet. She felt protective, even maternal of Stark studio girls.    
  
“Oh, sure they are,” Angie sighed. “Doesn’t mean they don’t want to kill each other.”

* * *

Steve was there that night and Bucky knew it, well beyond the obligation of studio attendance, beyond Ed’s warning, he could feel it in his bones like a magnet's tug. He was around, and it wasn’t that big an establishment. Still, it was easy to get lost if you tried, and Bucky got the impression Steve would try. He sought out an empty-handed cadet to palm off his mug. Bette’s rule: if you’re going to show up, _show up_. She didn’t word it like that, but he remembered it that way. He liked her fine, but wouldn't lie and tell you she didn't scare him just a little, just enough, just right.   
  
“Hey pal, you like some coffee? Just poured in the kitchen.” The boy took a moment to process what was happening. His eyes widened as he realized.  
  
“Aren’t you James Barnes?” he said. Bucky smiled flatly.  
  
“Sure hope so, that’s how I’ve been signing my checks.” The boy laughed, and that was a pleasant surprise. He had the kind of button nose that crinkled just so, friendly brown eyes. A child. They were suddenly the center of attention there, and a starstruck number of boys around them watched and listened before their attention could be diverted by junior hostesses flitting past with sandwiches and pie.  
  
“Wow, they weren’t kidding! I love hearing you on the radio. My ma’ll be thrilled to hear I saw you here.” Bucky swallowed dry. He couldn’t bring himself to write home when he was over there even briefly, frozen and fearful that any letter would be the last. The last, the last, the word gnawed constantly until he had nothing left to feed it. His last, Steve’s last. He nodded graciously out of habit.  
  
“You tell your ma I send my best. You gonna let this coffee go cold?”  
  
“Well sure, I’ll take it! That’s not yours?” The kid raised his voice to project over the din. Bucky shook his head.  
  
“This one’s for you!” He smiled and handed the cup over, the boy accepting as if it were a prize in plain white porcelain.  
  
“Thanks! Thank you very much, sir!” Bucky had already slipped away, back towards the stage. He tried to forget the boy’s face already, and all those young faces that looked so similar under the short brim of a helmet. What Steve’s eyes might look like in that shadow. He hadn’t looked him in the eye since. He shook the memory, and Steve appeared, the devil himself, on stage with Angie, to the delightful roar of the audience. Bucky slipped to the side, hugging the wall on a periphery he hoped Steve wouldn’t see. They used to make a game of heckling each other from the audience. He hadn’t felt like joking for a while.  
  
“Boys, I think this fellow’s no stranger to you, do I have that right?” The soldiers whooped and hollered. Angie was an excellent emcee, tossing a wink here and there and flashing that pin-up smile. Steve looked tired, and Bucky knew why. “This here’s Captain Steve Rogers, newly returned from the European theater. How long were you over there, Steve?” Bucky recognized bits and pieces of old acts; Steve fell back on old favorites when he didn’t have the heart to write up new ones. He flew through a couple of infantry jabs, a bit about rations, easy digs at Hitler and the German initiative; quick but perfectly timed to the crowd with practiced projection, it was a glowing callback to their vaudeville days in New York. Though it was integral to his routine, Steve had never actually served; not yet, but Bucky didn’t even entertain the thought. Angie’s wicked grin promised a surprise tonight, and Bucky caught sight of it behind her back. Steve would have to think on his feet, Bucky considered with a smile, his favorite pastime. Angie produced a very old photograph: a smaller, scrawnier Brooklyn Steve, dressed as a lion for some act or another a good six or seven years ago. Bucky loved that photo. It usually hung in Peggy Carter’s dressing room.  
  
"Here's a fine young soldier. _Steven G Rogers_ , it says, is that you?" A wave of adrenaline caught Steve and Bucky could see him perk up like a flower to the sun. God, how he loved to see Steve recognize a challenge.

"Steven Gwendolyn Rogers, that's me alright." Steve straightened his tie and already the audience was putty in his hands. The boys took to him easy when he got going on a self-deprecating streak; it was nearly his trademark. That, and fighting with broad-shouldered heartthrob James Barnes, _his comic foil_ , Steve called him. Jokes like fish in a barrel, he always thought, when Bucky was next to him back in the old neighborhood. They struck a naturally funny picture. That Steve, this little beanpole in the photograph, survived a harsh world, mostly on laughs and gall and thanks in no small part to a promise that neither had spoken aloud since they shared a bed in Brooklyn. 

"I might say you've changed since then." Angie winked at the audience. The boys swooned for her, chuckling. Steve nodded. The lantern light lit him slightly amber along the edges where the spot didn't hit; Bucky resented how nicely it haloed his blonde hair. 

"Well, sure. At least once a week. Can't wear the same bullet holes every day anymore, what'll the neighbors think?" The recruits laughed. Many nodded: an instant camaraderie. Bucky envied it, their connection, a needling envy he wanted to cut out of his heart with a knife. He ducked into the kitchen for another coffee, and the comedic performance continued. He could hear Steve echo around him in spite of the distance now; always could. When he returned, he parked on the back wall, eyes soft on his friend and the stage.

"I mean to say you were a very small young man growing up,” Angie said.

"Mm, flattery will get you everywhere, Miss Martinelli," Steve pouted and held for laughs. "That's true. I'll give you that, it's true."

"What happened?"

"Just like you said, I grew up. Couple of push-ups and the fear of God’ll turn any boy into a man in the armed forces. Say, Angie," Steve nudged her, pretending to strain a look at her steno pad. "I thought you had some questions for me. Sounds like you got all answers. Your field notes just have the word 'size' and a bunch of question marks on it? How about we start with shoes and I'll stop when we get to the racy parts." The boys wolf-whistled. Angie swatted him away, the curl of a real smile pulling her red lips sideways.

"You're an interesting guy, Mr. Rogers! Your fans just want to know more about you."

"That's fine," he swelled. "Go ahead, go ahead, I promise only to lie when it makes me look good."

"I'm sure all these young fellas would like to know if you've got anybody special in your life." Angie paused just long enough for blood to rise in Steve's cheeks as the insinuation hit him. Bucky held his breath. "So they can sleep at night knowing they won't lose their best girl to you, of course!”

"Nothing to worry about there," he recovered. "Even Margaret Carter calls in a stunt double for my kisses. Guess she thinks I ought to leave the wooing to the professionals." A young man in the crowd shouted out " _like Barnes?_ " and Steve furrowed his brows into a pout as the laughter grew. A worry passed over Angie's face like a cloud and she changed course.

"Oh, sure, your longtime friend Bucky Barnes, the one who always goes for the jugular in your classic duo skits," Angie tried. _He used to,_ Bucky thought.

"He sure does go for the jugular. It's harder to find now that I've hidden it in some neck." He gestured at the photo, bringing it back to attention: an excellent diversion that his lovely scene partner haplessly ignored. Soldiers chuckled in that warm glow of the lantern chandeliers above; Steve so easily charmed them, he, the littlest lion tamer. He was not little anymore.

"When did you two meet?" Angie spotted Bucky at the back of the room and he glared daggers at her. Steve didn’t want to play, and Bucky didn’t either. The audience could never tell; it was a gift.

"Fifteen minutes ago at the bar. Don't you worry, though, I told him I wasn't interested." The boys all laughed. Bucky frowned. James Barnes somehow picked up a label when he came to Hollywood and was known to be a real ladies’ man (laughably, Bucky thought.) Steve used to make that joke lightly with a wink and a nudge. He said it now like a death sentence.

"Oh, I'll bet he had five or six ladies to fall back on,” Angie replied, playing along with what was usually the throw of this bit: Steve was the can’t-win underdog with a heart of gold always trying for a bite, and Bucky got all the ladies by accident. The audience wore it comfortably, laughing easily, excited to recognize something from their favorite films. Steve laughed, one icy bark, with them.

"Well!” He said, “I hope one of them had the sense to catch him. I'd make a lightbulb joke but this is a family program. But anyway how many lightbulbs does it take to screw---" Angie bristled but the crowd roared, predicting the punchline. She scowled at his shit-eating grin. That was for the photo.

"And what would Bucky be like on the battlefield?" she asked, relentless. Steve didn’t miss a beat.

"Oh, Secret Weapon Barnes, we’d call him."

"Is that right?"

"You bet, just have to march him out on a sunny day and the reflection from his hair could blind a whole front line." Punchlines in his pocket like you wouldn’t believe. Bucky sighed, and wished he didn’t.

"Now, you make it sound like you two boys don't get along,” Angie said.

"Couldn't be more untrue,” Steve replied quickly. “We get on like a house on fire."

"Oh, that's nice!"

"Sure. Two of us together? Real pretty to look at but eventually you better call the cops." Laughter rolled in peels as he knocked an easy pitch out of the park. It was then that he caught sight of Bucky at the back of the house and nodded his head as if tipping a hat. “I’m sure you’d rather arrest him for that criminal singing voice of his, though, wouldn’t you? Want to hear him sing, boys? Grab yourself a girl, I’m willing to bet he’s got a slow one up those fancy sleeves of his.” The crowd whistled sharply and the band picked up, taking a cue from Angie. They played a smooth slow vamp on the opening to _I’ll Be Seeing You_ and a couple of fellows slapped Bucky on the back as he cut through them to take the stage. Steve had already slipped off and out by the time Bucky took the mic, and so much the better. Angie kept the routine going just a bit longer, a meddlesome spark in her eyes that Bucky had grown to despise. But with Steve in earshot, and the vitriol seeping fresh through his veins, he deigned to play the match his partner had set. He loosened his tie.  
  
"Gents, welcome back old honeypipes, James Barnes!” Angie said into the microphone. The crowd clapped, and already some of the couples were turning on the dance floor to the underscoring tune. “Your pal Steve Rogers really ran you through the ringer, Mr. Barnes.” Angie lobbed a setup to Bucky and he took his shot.

"Did he? What a guy. Well, I always have been the _bigger_ man." He knew Steve could hear him, could hear the icy edge to his words. _He started it,_ Bucky reminded himself. Once upon a time, there were two boys on a dim stage in front of an empty house making each other laugh. The room hummed now, rapt, full, important, and it didn't mean a thing. Angie dazzled obliviously.

"Only childhood friends could be so good at ribbing each other."

"That's true,” he responded. “Steve's always been better at ribbing than I am." Bucky flipped through a couple of selections on the piano and slid a piece of music towards the band leader, who held up the selection and made it known to the players. There was an empty moment as they transitioned, slightly clumsily. Angie kept talking to cover the quiet.

"Steve is better at ribbing? See, now that's kind,” she said.

"Yeah, just had to hug him and those ribs would stick ya right through his shirt." Bucky took a swig out of a glass next to the clarinet, unsurprised to find it was dry as a bone thanks to Bette’s no alcohol rule, but it punctuated the joke nicely. The band had picked back up and the dance floor was a flutter again. Bucky was ready with an assault.

"Say James, it sure looks like lot of the folks in our audience would love to hear you sing just a little something before you go. Did you throw something together for us just now?"

"Something tells me our talented pianist Perry already has the sheet music picked out, that's miraculous. Guess we’re going with this funny old waltz! Oh, I should be glad to indulge you, Perry, this one’s a real gem if you’ll pick up the tempo just a hair, get a little swing on that walk to shake the dust off forty years, there. Here we are, getting on now like a real _house on fire_ ,” Bucky said with a purposeful glance out against the lights. “Ladies, hold your boys tight. Tonight a thousand mothers could be singing this old hymn at home, just as I’m singing it to you fellas. Here’s my thanks, boys, an old church tune in case some of you don’t wake up in time for services tomorrow morning." A murmur of chuckles rose from the dance floor and the enchantment began. Bucky noticed Steve had taken a seat at a high-boy table with a few high ranking officers, keeping them laughing and serving up sandwiches. Steve stole a look at him as he alone recognized the tune, and Bucky knew what he’d done. His stare didn’t stray until the piece was through. 


	4. Chapter 4

The papers all described James Barnes as a crooner, and Steve loved to hate that. It colored Bucky like midnight, sentimental and smooth as velvet with stars in his eyes, but that didn't quite describe the Bucky he knew (the stars, he might concede.) Reading these rather blind reviews of Bucky reminded him of a time back home when churchgoers couldn't see the choir in the gallery of the chapel, and wouldn't they be surprised when that strong, clear baritone, like the sword of some vengeful angel in a hall of stone, belonged to this rakish stealer of hearts. And sure as salt they couldn’t match the bell-tone tenor to his little partner in crime, the scrappy one with who had stained glass bruises up and down in colors like the rose window. Crooner was right, maybe, but there was always more, Steve lamented, there is always more than whatever the papers decide to call you, and you had to hold on to that tightest of all. It would be far better, more telling, to read the depth of a sigh after a night on the dance floor with him, or the way real love might light up someone’s eyes to hear him treat an Ella Fitzgerald standard with the wisp and caress of fresh cream swirling through perfectly hot coffee. Let them have James Barnes, he thought, if Bucky was all his. One especially flippant rag called his voice "sweet," and that was all. Bucky rarely read reviews; Steve got angry enough then for both of them.

"Sweet!" he’d fumed. "Buck, that's backhanded."

"Sweet means sweet. It's a compliment," Bucky shrugged. "No harm, Stevie."

" _Sweet_ ," Steve grumbled, condemning that article to the waste basket. "Takes the Brooklyn right outta you."

"Then put it right back." Buck smirked into a kiss, fingers hooked in the pockets of Steve's trousers, taking him by surprise. That memory looked Steve in the eyes when it hurt him most of all, when from the wings he watched James Barnes belong to the audience. He thought seated among them it might be different, that he could melt into the performance and lose the context just like the rest of them. He couldn’t. Buck was singing “Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight,” hand picked from an arsenal for the most critical damage. Steve was surrounded by coupled hopefuls, beautiful girls from the studio pressed close to these lucky, unlucky souls, and Bucky’s voice hung heavy like a full moon on a clear night, pregnant with hurt. The song was ancient, torn straight from a hymnal they shared in Brooklyn, and sang maybe only once or twice in all their begrudged hours in Steve’s mother’s choir (Bucky wasn’t even baptized, for Christ’s sake, he just had a goddamn miraculous voice.) It was a temperance tune, low and lamenting, and hand to God, Steve would swear he had never given a second thought to its lyrics until that very night and he surely never wanted to hear them again. As the final refrain wrapped up and the dance floor gave an appreciative if sentimental round of applause, Bucky shook himself from the trance. _Don’t make it worse, Bucky, please don’t._ But James “Bad Luck Buck” Barnes rubbed salt in that gaping wound like mercy was a dirty word, and he framed it for the hundreds of watching eyes like a harmless radio comedy bit. If Steve didn’t know any better, he might think it was good-natured.  
  
“Oh, there he is! What're ya doing out there in the audience, Stevie?" Bucky tucked his thumbs behind his lapels and challenged. Steve hadn't noticed the tight set of his jaw until he tried to loosen it.

"Thought I’d stick around and see what all the fuss is about, Buck." He could feel the energy of the audience change; he knew that vibration, that anticipation. They wanted this, asked for it. Steve obliged.

"What'd you think?" Bucky asked, a low, slow pitch for an easy pop fly.

"Oh, fine, passing grade. The sandwiches, I mean.” The officers crowded around his table all laughed heartily. Bucky didn’t lose the beat of the banter, caught it midair with sailing grace to continue the bit.

"Guess you didn't hear me sing, then?" He asked. Steve’s projection carried over the din easily, terrifyingly. Such a big voice in those small lungs, since the very beginning.

"Sing? Oh no, dear, I was lost in your eyes."

"Need directions? Turn left at blue and keep going till you're outta my sight, Rogers." That was it, the apex, and Steve knew to fall back. Bucky used to let him have it, knew he loved to choreograph that climax and settle through the denouement's warm glow like it kept him alive. But he didn't just now, and Steve couldn't ignore the loss.   
  
“A good soldier follows orders.” He made a crooked salute as the laughter petered. “By your leave.” He faltered just a touch, making a sweeping bow, and the bit was over. He made a parting joke and excused himself from the table as the audience applauded and the band picked up, swinging into a faster, lindy-friendly tune and, bobbing a few short bows, Bucky slipped backstage. Steve had bolted out the stagedoor, strangely and acutely aware as he darted through the makeshift kitchen that he’d been holding his fists tight in his lap the whole time, white-knuckled at fight-or-flight. He breathed the muggy night air with a huff and settled hard against the side of the old barn. A slew of men and women were back there, a few dancers catching fresh air, and a small crowd of eager fans talking up Margaret Carter. She autographed postcards and napkins for them, a magical few kisses thrown here and there. He watched her reverently for a moment, taking in her picture, sharp and soft in places to drive desire like a freight train on a hot night, textbook stunning even in a plain white dress and grey apron. When one of the boys asked Steve to sign a postcard beneath her lip-print, she turned that beacon smile on him.

“Darling, how are you.” Peggy kissed him on the cheek and a few girls tittered, little birds on a wire. Steve smiled flatly.  
  
“Better now.” Steve’s cornered animal panic as he fell out the door must have given him away. Peggy read him easily but wouldn’t let him lose face in front of these kids, or the odd reporter that always, always found a way to hang around the stage door waiting for a lead. Peggy’s eyes darted just so, over Steve’s shoulder, to warn him of onesuch presence. A gentleman with rolled sleeves and an almost imperceptible wad of scratch paper was leaned against the wall chatting up a couple of WACs with eyes and ears elsewhere.

“Was that James Barnes I just heard singing a dreary waltz?” she asked pointedly, a breathy uptick in her voice indicating her character was on; she was Margaret and not Peggy. Steve wished he knew how to navigate his persona so well.  
  
“Was it? I thought that racket was some cats in heat out in the alley, thought I’d better come check. Peg---” he was dying to confide but she cut him off at the pass.

“Just us chickens out here.” Peggy smiled light and low. “I think things are winding down. You ought to go home. Big shooting day Monday for both of us, I understand. I’ll swing by, shall I? I’ve missed you.”

“Yeah.” Steve swallowed and straightened. “I’d like that.” Steve shook a flock of hands as enthusiastically as possible before making his way to a taxi. He was still wearing his camera smile for the driver, who looked all but numb to a flash of Hollywood teeth. The hour wasn’t yet too small but sleep seemed a perfectly honorable goal nonetheless. He knew Bucky's hymn would choke his dreams, the recurring horrible images of hell that surely awaited them both. Steve twisted to look out the back windshield as they pulled away. He could see Bucky coming out the stage door just then, just too late, Peggy greeting him, and Steve pushed away the child’s guilt that called him a coward in ringing taunts through his mind. The car took him further away, and he felt it.

* * *

“What was that tune you were singing just then? Steve Rogers had quite a reaction,” Peggy said vaguely, continuing an effort to kiss as many soldiers goodnight as they left the Canteen. Bucky bristled and glanced sideways.  
  
“Goodnight,” he smiled quickly, shaking a few sailors’ hands. “Thank you, best of luck to ya.” He then shoved his hands in his pockets then and turned to her. “Just an old chestnut, Peggy. Probably wouldn’t know it in Jolly Old England. Temperance song.” The irony of that wasn’t lost on Peggy; Bucky only just sobered completely, though the melancholy air continued to hang about him.  
  
“Steve seemed to know it.”  
  
“And what’d he have to say?” Bucky asked casually but couldn't help but reveal his real curiosity.  
  
“Very little. I sent him home. He looked tired.” Peggy looked at him critically. “Would you help me clean up the kitchen? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.” But Bucky said nothing and disappeared inside. When she returned to finish the final round of dish washing with a couple of the studio carpenters, she could hear his voice ringing in the now-empty dance hall, and he accompanied himself on the piano.  
  
“I could listen to him til the cows come home, I’ll tell you that much,” one of the older fellows said. “That’s a gift from God.”  
  
“Truly gifted,” Peggy agreed with a real smile. She started to mentally inventory the coffee left over.  
  
“Paulie did you ever see that first picture he and Rogers did together? _Two Jerks with a Cherry_?” One fellow asked the other as they finished up.  
  
“Sure did. Took my wife on a date! I was worried she was falling in love with Barnes instead of me! Hey, you know, they set up the old fountain set on stage 5 the other day, from that picture. Shot a bit of newsreel. I repainted the menu board, took me all of an hour.” Peggy tuned in suddenly.  
  
“The set of _Two Jerks_ is up?” She handed Paulie a towel to wipe his hands.  
  
“Thanks. Yeah, kind of funny. I wonder how many kids’ll notice it’s the same one!”  
  
“How long will it be up, do you imagine?” Peggy asked, wheels turning. “I’d love to see it.”  
  
“Confidentially, Miss Carter,” said Paulie, “we don’t have to strike it until we load in a hospital ward situation for Stars  & Bars, and that got pushed back a whole week while we rebuild Stark’s fairground lot. So I say go see it all you like.” He winked at her and said goodnight and Peggy was alone again, piano drifting mournfully through. Jarvis showed up not too long after, once she had turned down the lights most every place but the main hall where Bucky was holding midnight services with a repeating prayer of _At Your Command._ She listened to him from the officers’ table, unseen, and Jarvis joined her.  
  
“Is that my unwilling charge?” he whispered with a yawn. Peggy pulled out a chair for him.  
  
“Dramatic as ever. What will we do with them, Mr. Jarvis?” she asked quietly. Bucky played for no one and his hands fluttered the keys utterly enchanted, his voice soaring sweet and dark above the flourish as he moved into _You’ll Never Know_ .  
  
“From what I gather, Rogers wants to enlist to protect Barnes’ reputation and save their souls, Barnes thinks its suicide and is scared to lose him so he refuses to entertain the possibility, and neither of them understands they’re doing it for the other.”  
  
“The gift of the stupid, self-sacrificing magi,” Peggy said as her head fell to her hands. “So _dramatic_!”  
  
“This is Hollywood after all.” Jarvis shrugged.  
  
“No, this is Brooklyn. This is a hero complex,” Peggy said. “A Greek tragedy.”  
  
“Achilles and Patroclus, I might think.” Jarvis smiled at his own reference. Peggy did not.  
  
“Steve, you precious fool,” she sighed. Peggy knew him better than well (intimately, in fact, and Jarvis only knew this because it was his business to know, spin, and publicize the relationships of stars in his care) so Jarvis measured her responses with this in mind.  
  
“Did that never bother you? What he and Barnes--- have?” _Bother_ , Peggy thought lightly. _How tame._ But she turned toward diplomacy, away from what her heart might say in a darker corner.  
  
“You cannot stand in the way of true love, especially when it’s a freight train on fire barreling towards a mountain like theirs. One moves aside,” she groused. “But I caught wind of an interesting tidbit just now. I think I can manage to get them to talk to each other.” Peggy stood up and clapped as Bucky finished a number. He stood and sloppily bowed, flipping his suit coat out as if had tails before sitting back down to put his head in his hands. Jarvis then lowered his voice.  
  
“I myself was scheming at dinner. What’s your plan?” He asked, knowing she had already devised one. Her poker face was in full bloom.  
  
“What’s yours?” she countered. Jarvis shrugged. He missed the cover of piano, but kept his tone quiet anyway, hoping the warm wood of the Old Barn would soak up his sound.  
  
“Stark is hosting a terrible bonds charity golf outing tomorrow evening that could use another pair.” Peggy’s eyes sparkled with delight.  
  
“Oh _no_.”  
  
“Oh yes.” He picked his jacket up off his chair and prepared to drive Bucky home. Peggy thought briefly of her soft bed at home, a good night’s rest ahead. But as Bucky drifted off stage the nagging worry that kept her up at night, of the war, of her home, her friends, her heart, threatened.  
  
“I don’t know that forced interaction will work,” she said. “They’ve had plenty of that on-set.”  
  
“And your idea is better?” Jarvis knew it would be.  
  
“It is.” She hoped it was.  
  
“Care to put some money on it?” He asked. Peggy could see a desperation there, something of her own as well, to forget everything else and try, God, try to live something of a joyful life amidst the worry. She wanted it for him as much as for Steve, for Bucky, for England and the cause. It was such a simple, horribly far reach of a hope.   
  
“These are our friends, Mr. Jarvis. You would gamble on their affections?”  
  
“I would.”  
  
“How much?”


	5. Chapter 5

When Peggy wrapped her scenes on Monday ahead of schedule (efficient as always, and very proud of her one-take reputation,) she slipped next door to see Steve in his dressing room. He was reading through a packet of printed paper with a frown etched deep in his forehead. She knocked and let herself in.  
  
“Doing homework, I see,” she said, folding into the makeup chair next to his. He handed her the top pages to look at, reserving the part he was currently hating.  
  
“I gotta show up at this stupid charity golf situation this afternoon. Out of the blue.” Steve's eyes danced along his page and he scrunched his nose further with every line, a wince into a full-face grimace he reserved for truly unacceptable jokes. He grabbed a pencil and rejected an entire paragraph with an aggressive scribble. Peggy huffed; Jarvis’s truly boring golf plan was in motion. “They wrote me a whole book of jokes, if you can believe it, Peg. You look stunning as always,” he added. Peggy was still wearing her nun costume from the shoot next door and he smiled sideways about it. She handed him the plastic rosary beads from her pocket and he laughed, trading her the dogtags from Joe’s wardrobe uniform from his dressing table, which was just a litter of paper and trinkets and bits of script here and there, paper clippings of every order and no visible order to them. She slipped the tags over her head and raised her eyebrows approvingly before turning her attention to the packet. She held out a hand and he shared more of the stack without hesitation.   
  
“And who is _they_?” Peggy flipped through the packet and noticed the signatures of the writer’s room on the second page. “Oh, this old boys club. Haven’t they got any women on staff?” She groused.  
  
“Doubt it. You’re worth a hundred of these clucks. You should see what passes for a line.” Steve had a habit of showering Peggy in casual admiration like nothing else ever ran through his head. She didn’t hate it.  
  
“Lord knows a woman needs a good sense of humor to sign with Howard, in any case,” she rolled her eyes. “Are these all supposed to be golf jokes?”  
  
“I wouldn’t know," he replied, "nobody plays golf in Brooklyn. I guess they thought I wouldn’t come up with any material of my own.”  
  
“How they underestimate you.”  
  
“I know!” He exclaimed with mock hurt. “They just wanna march me out to sell more bonds.” He didn't hate the improvisational end of bonds events, but he could do without the nagging feeling that he was just a dancing monkey on a good day.  
  
“That’s a noble effort, though, Steve. I personally feel we must do everything we can. Don’t you feel that?” She egged him. He nodded, glancing at her sidelong. “I imagine Stars  & Bars must be a bit of a departure, though I never quite got the whole story of your ill-fated tour. Do you want to talk about it?” She asked. He answered too quickly.  
  
“Not particularly. How was your---”  
  
“These are lovely,” she weighed the dog tags in her hand. “Very realistic. Did you ever think to join the armed forces?”  
  
“Not in the last fifteen minutes, anyway,” Steve said, suspiciously. “Why all the questions, Peg?”  
  
“Why are you doing this to Bucky?” She baited. Unexpectedly, Steve got the wind properly knocked out of him.  
  
“Why am I---? Why am I doing this to _Bucky_?” He stammered, but suddenly the words flooded out of him. “Woo, you have no idea! I’m doing this to Bucky? Am I the one singing ‘Where is My Boy Tonight’ like some damn church boy and looking me dead in the eye? Like he wasn’t the one who--- He’s giving them fodder--- Peg,” Steve struggled to find the words. “I was honest, I just want him to live out his dreams. It's not like I'm breaking up with him, I'm just--- if--- people would hate him, we can’t ever---”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“You _don’t_! You’ve never been bullied, Peggy, you’ve never worried somebody might put you in the ground just because you--- just because.” Tension knotted his knuckles and he held his hands tight in his lap, striking fists around her rosary beads. "And you don't have to worry what happens after that."  
  
“Unfortunately, I do.” Peggy tried for comfort but it didn’t land.  
  
“So then you don’t need to ask why. Or how. I’m sure Jarvis told you.” Steve could tell from her stolid expression that he was right. He ran a hand through his hair, defeated. “I won’t fight Bucky, I’m tired. He’s my best friend, I just can’t do that. That’s all Stark’s people keep asking: if I can’t fix it I have to fight it. And I’d rather lay down on the tracks.”  
  
“Steve, you’ve got to fight _for_ him. I’m beginning to think you don’t know the difference.” She brushed a thumb over his cheekbone, an uncanny reminder to herself that beneath all the fuss and film were simple bones and a simple boy. “And don’t be dramatic, laying on the tracks. That may pass for a joke on your stage but not on mine, I won’t have it even in jest.”  
  
“Peggy.” Steve slumped with a weight then that he couldn’t have shown another soul, showing his hand in full confidence only to reveal it had been a bluff all along, and he was hopelessly all-in. For what, really, he couldn’t tell, but he wanted to thank her. No one else had bothered to look, or they might have seen he wasn’t even holding a single pair. “I love you, you know that. But you don’t get it.” Peggy shrugged. _Too little and far too late_ , she might say, if she were feeling more careless, if she were letting the old wounds sting in fresh air. But her beads twisting in his hands got the better of her, and she was resolutely, stubbornly sure to keep herself out of it.  
  
“Of course. You loved me, darling, I know. I knew it then, you don’t need to say it like an apology now.”  
  
“Now this script I _have_ read.” Steve offered a smile. “You running lines on me, Carter?”  
  
“Oh, do,” Peggy spat, painted lips twisting. “Go ahead, hide in your jokes, Steven.”  
  
“Force of _habit,_ ” he laughed now only at her costume. “What can I do?” Quiet followed, for just a breath, and the gravity of blue in his eyes felt darker in this light. Peggy knew he asked more than he said.  
  
“My dear boy,” she huffed as she handed back his dog tags. “Did it occur to you that perhaps you hurt his feelings?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“It sounds rather like you said something like ‘I’m shoving off to war, nuts to your heart!’”  
  
“I’ve never heard you say nuts to anything in your whole life,” Steve marveled.  
  
“Are you listening to me?”  
  
“Yes. Sorry. It’s the nun get-up, I just feel naturally inclined to frustrate you,” he grinned. Peggy swatted at him.  
  
“Weren’t you a choirboy? Have you no shame?”  
  
“I was,” Steve said, “and I know an awful lot about shame, thanks all the same.” The plastic rosary beads fumbled through his fingers, muscle memory nipping there. He set them on the table and pushed them further aside. Peggy saw his eyes darting past them to focus elsewhere and wondered how many one-liners and baits were spiraling in his head. She knew about that gift. It worried her.  
  
“I know finding spiritual peace is difficult, Steven, but---”  
  
“What, here in Babylon? They sell it by the glass, don’t they,” he mused darkly. Peggy sighed.  
  
“Why must you fall on this sword?”  
  
“Well, Mother Superior, that’s what you do, isn’t it? When you can’t be in love?” Steve picked up a sheet of golf jokes and folded it into a plane to launch at himself in the mirror. He only met her eyes in his reflection. She pulled her veil off, unpinning tight curls that had held it in place.  
  
“Lord, you _are_ dramatic." Peggy knew him, his giant heart and its capacity to love so far that it flipped over into the absurd. It was a special kind of tragic.  
   
“You love it. I can see it just there, etched in your cold, British exterior,” he grinned, ready to fight with fun as he always felt comfortable doing. Peggy didn’t indulge.  
  
“I despise it," she said. "I wish you could hear yourself, you martyr.”  
  
“I am not a martyr.”  
  
“Look up the word martyr in a dictionary, Steve Rogers. As a nun I am intimately familiar,” she tried to joke right back but now he bristled.  
  
“Dies for a good cause, I know what it means.”  
  
“Not when your good cause doesn’t _want_ you to die, then it’s just inconsiderate!”  
  
“Always worried about propriety, the British,” he joked.  
  
“I’m worried about you, and I’m not alone, and I don’t think you’re being honest.” Peggy huffed.  
  
“You want honest?” Steve said. “I hate it here and I want to go home.” He looked himself in the mirror as he said it and his eyes dropped immediately, heavy heart dragging a hard anchor through the sand.   
  
“Everyone hates it here. That’s the great secret of Hollywood,” Peggy reached out to lay a hand on his shoulder. But tugging at her sleeve, her meddlesome plan was still fresh in mind and she wasn’t about to lose five pounds sterling to Edwin Jarvis over the future of Steve and Bucky, whom she was fully confident would not find their resolution on the golf course no matter how funny it turned out to be. She cleared her throat. “But I can see I won’t convince you. I came to invite you to a party.”  
  
“You hate parties,” he responded, tearing an entire page from the packet of jokes and crumpling it. Peggy committed to her story.  
  
“Not that kind of party. I do hate those parties,” she admitted. “I’m throwing Angie a little surprise after hours on sound stage 5 tonight.”  
  
“Stark know about that?” Steve asked, now scribbling in his own dialogue over the script he was given.  
  
“Stark will _be_ there.” Peggy looked him harder in the eye to combat what she hoped was not a tell; a wandering gaze might give her lie away. But details, she had remembered from a childhood of fibs and glorified mistruths to get herself out of trouble, made anything believable. “He’s providing the refreshments, as it were.”  
  
“Awfully generous, that Howard Stark.”  
  
“He made her take that awful milkmaid script, he owes her more than one night’s worth of alcohol, I assure you,” Peggy sighed and Steve laughed. The three of them dodged that bullet but only barely. Peggy was thankful to every god with a listening ear that she was pigeon-holed for vampy noir at the moment.  
  
“I don’t know if I’ll have the energy after this tournament.” He tried to imagine himself stumbling through an entire afternoon of a sport he’d never tried. He wasn’t _unathletic_ , but physical comedy was only a saving grace for so long before you are just plain  _embarrassing_.  
  
“You must come,” Peggy insisted a bit too quickly. “She’ll be heartbroken if it’s just me and Howard.”  
  
“Quite the circle of friends. Alright, I’ll make an appearance. Should I bring a gift?” The image flickered in Peggy’s mind, Steve arriving at the set only to find Bucky, and she went for it.  
  
“Oh, no. No trouble. She likes flowers, I suppose.”  
  
“Flowers it is.” As if on cue and entirely oblivious, Angie threw Steve’s door open with a huff. She was distraught, and making an open display of it.  
  
“The hits keep on coming!” she exclaimed, thrusting a newspaper at Steve. “Look at that picture, Steve! English, I’m going out tonight. Are you in?”  
  
“Absolutely. We’ll have a perfect evening,” she replied quickly, leaving no room for ruining a surprise that didn’t exist. Her eyes darted to Steve, who skimmed the newspaper.  
  
“When was this taken?” he asked, looking for the caption. The photo was from a performance he could only barely remember: Bucky and Angie were sharing a mic in front of Jimmy Dorsey’s orchestra at Christmastime, she in a sweeping silvery gown (the photo did it no justice,) and Bucky sharp and solid as ever in as perfect a suit as ever was tailored, so handsome and so talented that even the real A-listers had come up to shake his hand after the performance. Steve was singing backup with another young man from the studio. “Dernier before he shipped out,” he said fondly. “Jones was there that night, too.”  
  
“Last year. Can you believe they used that shot? I look like Moby Dick in that dress,” Angie lamented. Peggy looked over Steve’s shoulder.  
  
“I’d say the article is less flattering than the dress, darling,” she said. “I’ve told you not to read these reviews, they only want to cause a stir.”  
  
“Consider me stirred,” Angie grumbled, folding her arms. Steve couldn’t tear his eyes from the photograph.  
  
“Do you remember that night?” he asked absently. Angie rolled her eyes.  
  
“How could I forget? They played Tangerine in Bucky's key and I never got to come in!”  
  
“As I recall you had no trouble not-coming-in all by yourself,” Steve chuckled under his breath. “They ended up not recording with Bucky, but nobody ever sang it like him again.” He remembered. The whole room swooned together then. It was only just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Steve could hardly believe they went on, but of course they did. On with the show. “I thought I was gonna pass out meeting Carole Lombard,” he laughed. “She was there.”  
  
“Was she?” Peggy asked. Angie sighed.  
  
“Wasn’t that a shame? Just horrible, losing her like that. Did you hear about that plane wreckage in the mountains? Just awful. One of our own, just like that,” she said. Peggy kept her eyes on Steve, who continued to stare into the photo.  
  
“She was doing her part, Angie, the most any of us can do,” she said cautiously. Carole had been on a tour selling bonds when the plane went down. Angie shifted in her strap shoes, antsy with gossip.  
  
“Oh, I know it. But it really destroyed Clark Gable. Did you ever get to meet him before? They two of them were just--- I mean if anybody could, they made you believe in real love, if that’s a good way of putting it, they were just meant for each other in some kinda cosmic way. You hate to see that happen. He’s like a ghost now. Really tore him apart. I can’t believe they let him go.” Peggy couldn’t get a solid read on Steve’s face but he turned to look up at Angie as she told it.  
  
“Go where?”  
  
“Air force. He really threw himself into it. I guess when you lose someone that close to you, that special, I don’t know what else there is to do. What a horrible thought. I can’t even imagine. Can you imagine, Peg?” Angie asked, oblivious. Steve had turned back to the photo, silent.  
  
“I cannot.” Angie continued to gab at her about soldiers she’d met at the Canteen, how awfully sad it made her to think of their uncertain fates, their loved ones waiting. Steve smoothed the article’s crease. You could only just barely still see the spark in Bucky’s eyes that they brought with them to Hollywood only months before. But the photograph captured something even less subtle: Bucky was throwing a sidelong look at Steve (his lashes caught just so in the spotlight) as he sang that Steve, even in shadow, returned with such adoration that perhaps was a friendly shared joke at Angie’s flub, or something else. Steve had a strange impulse to crumble it into his coffee and devour it, as if it would taste of Christmas moonbeams and Bucky’s sweet lull instead of inky newsprint. “Can I keep this?” he asked. Angie huffed, now resting her head on Peggy’s shoulder, her honey-brown curls crumpling.  
  
“Oh. I never want to see that again. Set it on fire for all I care,” she said, immediately dropping the moment of existential gloom she’d walked herself into accidentally, thinking of the war.  “How can I get the meaty roles like Peg if they keep writing about me like I’m a joke?” Steve carefully ripped out the photo.  
  
“Maybe talk to Jarvis about it,” he suggested. “He fixes things.” Jarvis had more than once told Angie he could not fix entire scripts. Peggy kissed her sweetly on the head.  
  
“Let’s get a snack at the commissary. Dinner's on me tonight,” she said, and she winked at Steve as she turned Angie out of the room under her arm. Steve sat for a moment, remembering. Clark Gable. He’d pushed it from his mind. When Carole's plane went down, all they could give him from the wreckage, proof that it was really the love of his life that went down with it, was a little bauble, some piece of jewelry Steve couldn’t recall, but it was the jewel that set Gable off: that particular color, was it garnet or emerald? was their cute little signature, Ma and Pa, they called themselves. He was Captain Gable now, flying high in a B-17, and eager to meet her on the other side under the auspices of valor. Steve looked at the photo. Would he tuck this in his helmet when he went? This young, starry Bucky was a memory, and Steve couldn’t love him here. But Steve was still little blonde choirboy no matter how hard he pushed back, how deep he dove into some other part to play. The sound of his heart beating out a prayer of _forgive me_ , _forgive me,_  kept him up at night. He couldn't bear it. But the idea of Captain Rogers could. It still seemed as good a solution as any. The whole business confused him. He wished for simplicity. And, glaring at the script of jokes the writers had provided for him, he wished for patience. Peggy’s prop rosary sat on his dressing table, tangled with his ( _Joe’s_ , he reminded himself,) dog tags. He hadn’t thought to pray, but the moment seemed settled. _Dear God,_ he thought, _Lord, I know you stopped listening the moment I touched Bucky Barnes with my lips, that You crossed out our names from Your holy ledgers with a bolt of lightning. But I can earn it back_. He had one, perfect, righteous bargaining chip, he thought, the solution to all these worries.  
  
_God, save James Barnes, but I will make it right._

* * *

“Jesus Christ almighty,” Bucky Barnes cursed under his breath as he hitched his loaned bag of golf clubs over his shoulder. “Mary and Joseph and all the goddamn saints--- Stark I want a contract negotiation _yesterday_.” Steve choked a laugh as he followed him, tugging a stupid hat lower over his brows. He’d decided if he was going to play a dumb sport he wanted to look the part, and he looked as dumb as the wardrobe department would let him get away with, pants cuffed over argyle golfing socks and a Scottish hat with a little puff on top. It was too hot, but the look was worth it. Bucky looked sweetly dashing in a sweater vest and slacks, understated but equally silly, as the game required. He was not having a great time.  
  
“Jarvis said you wanted to be more active in the war effort,” Howard grinned, teeing up at the start of what seemed like the thirty or fortieth hole to Steve. The sun was merciless, but folks had come to see the show nonetheless, hopefully to purchase bonds and auctioned goods at the tournament’s end. Luckily, their team only had to handle the back nine.  
  
“Give me some pointers here, folks,” Howard asked the crowd that had gathered to watching him tee off. “How’s my stance?” He lined himself up to drive and Steve pretended to size him up.  
  
“You gotta stop wiggling your ass so much; that’s why you’re suffering.”  
  
“That’s why the _audience_ is suffering,” Bucky added. Steve picked up the permission to launch and went for it, Bucky following gamely just as he always had, eager to grasp at the old spark if not only to ignore the heat, absurdity, and frustration of it all. And for all that, he forgot to give Steve the cold shoulder. They fell into a routine.  
  
“You hook right, so shoot left.”  
  
“But the green is left, so hook a little right.”  
  
"Right."  
  
"No, left."  
  
“Really important drive, this one.”  
  
“Hate to be in his shoes, wouldn’t you, Buck?”  
  
“Pressure’s really on him, Steve.”  
  
“Focus, there, Howard.”  
  
“Say, is that Dorothy Lamour?”  
  
“Don’t look now!”  
  
“Will you two _shut down the laugh factory for ten seconds here_?” Howard stood upright furiously and the crowd roared. Steve and Bucky leaned on their drivers waiting, bowing and apologizing in mock contrition.  
  
“Sure, boss.”  
  
“Sorry, boss.”  
  
“You go right ahead, boss.”  
  
“Great weather we’re having, though, boss.” Howard made a sloppy, angry drive down the fairway.  
  
“Oh my god, you two,” he muttered. Steve shielded his vision and looked far towards the green, making a low whistle.  
  
“Nice shot, boss! Say, caddy, how’m I doing?” He called. “Who’s got the highest score?” A boy scribbling on a little card did some quick math.  
  
“Mr. Barnes has the highest score so far.” Bucky slicked back his hair in mock pride.  
  
“Don’t worry, Stevie, you’ll catch up,” he said. Steve felt at ease, perfectly, for the first time in a while. He adjusted his hat.  
  
“I could really be a fine golfer, I think, if I could get the aim and also the skill.” Onlookers chuckled, and, somehow, Bucky smiled.  
  
“Let’s not make a habit of it, Rogers,” he said, setting up for another failed drive into an inevitable bunker. “Did I get the sand? How many extra points for sand?”

* * *

To Jarvis’s delight they played nice for the whole of the tournament, even straight through the auction, and sold more than a significant amount of Series E bonds. Howard decided to drive his own car back to the lot and Jarvis thought it more than convenient that Steve and Bucky should have to share the car with him back to Hollywood proper. He brought the black Olds around as they stood next to each other on the club’s front steps, close but silent.  
  
“You want I should sit up front or do you want us both in the back?” Bucky asked, exhausted.  
  
“Backseat, please, my large chauffeured children,” Jarvis opened the door for him and he slid through to the other side. Steve followed. The drive down 1 was lovely if winding, and unearthly quiet. The ocean stretched out away from them as the rocks gave way to hearty blues. Jarvis looked back in the mirror when he began to worry.  
  
“Seems like you two---”  
  
“You just couldn’t help yourself, could you, Rogers?” Bucky cut him off and Steve jumped at it.  
  
“What the hell did I do this time?”  
  
“Don’t,” he warned, turned to Steve a look twisted with hurt. “Like it’s that easy! Gonna act like everything’s fine, just the same as it was, huh? God damn it!” he was shouting now.  
  
“Of course I want it to be the same, Buck, don’t you? I--- gosh. That was the most myself I’ve felt since----”  
  
“Oh, since you told me you wanted to die for me and I said no and somehow that was the wrong thing to say?” Bucky remembered the sounds, the rumbling earth, that sinking horrible darkness of recognizing Steve's cold goodbye, a denial of everything they were or might be. Steve felt the blame and rejected it.  
  
“And then you start killing yourself with alcohol? Like that’s not the same? What the hell, Buck?”  
  
“Don’t lecture me on escape, Rogers, don’t you fucking dare. We---” Jarvis felt the five pound wager slipping out of his hands and he had to interject.  
  
“It seems to me like you both want the sa---”  
  
“Shut up, Jarvis,” they said in unison, Steve adding, “with all due respect.” They drove in silence and Jarvis dropped Steve off at a florist on his request. Bucky’s eyes stared dead and dark out the window without acknowledging his leaving.  
  
“Sorry we yelled at you, Ed,” he said after a while, as they drove on. Jarvis sighed deeply.  
  
“I am a fixer by trader, Mr. Barnes. It’s a tough business,” he said plainly, “because I make all business my business. So I am familiar with hurt, and loss, and inconsistencies and slights. But as such, I cannot fix what does not admit it is broken.” Bucky felt the weight of those words in his stomach as they pulled past an evening guard and through the Stark Studio gates, gilded but common iron underneath. “May I ask what you’ll be doing on a sound stage at this hour?” Bucky composed himself and got out of the car.  
  
“Peggy’s throwing Angie a surprise party,” he said. “I’m sure she’d have invited you if---”  
  
“My wife expects me home, I’m afraid,” Jarvis quickly countered, recognizing the setup. “Give her my regards.”  
  
“Sure thing. Thanks for the ride, Ed.” Bucky gave him a half-hearted salute and began walking the quiet lot towards the big barn doors on Studio 5. The sun was just considering setting for the evening, still stranded in a lazy golden almost, and his shadow followed long after him. Jarvis hoped that the following morning’s tea would bring him new problems, and that this one would right itself with or without five quid hanging in the balance.


	6. Chapter 6

Mother nature has a keen sense of drama; a lily's petals spill out from a perfectly sewn seam and pollen lights the stamens with bright embers, all swimming in a heady nectar nose that entices to the point of overwhelming. Steve hoped lilies were a good choice for Angie. He thought, at the florist, they looked like fireworks, or dancers, and smelled like Easter mass, but they wilted a bit in the heat of the walk. The massive warehouse doors of stage 5 were rolled open only slightly, just enough, and the set within was glowing sweetly under work lights; he recognized it with a sharp tug on his heart. _Two Jerks with a Cherry_ : _a comedic masterpiece to satisfy your sweet tooth_ , he remembered, was the tagline. The counter shone so clean, the silver lining and green marble facade as polished and bright as the day he and Bucky first arrived on set. Bastian Blessing soda fountains were all built similarly, a sort of assembly line situation that could be ordered for any local pharmacy in a variety of styles and colors, this one a very suave forest green situation with pleasing chrome curves and edges. Glasses and candy jars lined the back wall, and they’d replaced the old mirror that reflected the ice cream basins and Hamilton malt mixers with a new menu board listing war bond prices beneath the treats (clever, he thought.) Steve remembered it just like this, just like it was yesterday: himself in a sodajerk apron and rolled sleeves, inventing creations between takes for Bucky to try with the real ice cream on set, and Bucky sitting there on a stool watching him like the movie could wait a thousand years. That was the most ice cream he’d ever eaten in his life. He thought between the sugar and the natural high of figuratively eating a set with Bucky’s eyes egging him on, he was just about flying. And as if the memory could talk, Bucky Barnes looked up at Steve from the center bar stool.  
  
“What’re you doing here?” he asked. He was noticing the flowers with a frown.  
  
“Peggy said---” Steve stopped short. Bucky had a bottle of champagne with a ribbon. It was clear, then, and he realized.  
  
“Oh.” Bucky did, too. “Yeah. Peggy. Well.” He dismissed the moment. Now he could choose to leave, to argue, or to try. He tried. “Have a seat, I hear this kid makes a mean chocolate soda.” Steve set the flowers on the counter and sat with one stool between them.  
  
“You been sitting here long?” He asked. Bucky nodded.  
  
“Almost long enough to remember my lines. ‘Skip, we gotta mop this place up before Mr. Hartford gets back!’ Riveting stuff, can’t believe we didn’t get awards for it.” He almost smiled, lost somewhere in nostalgia, and Steve was there, too. “I’ve been thinking about something Jarvis said. About fixing things.” Steve swiveled to face him, but Bucky continued to stare into the set, as if watching a his own ghost perform the old dance. His hair was falling a bit out of place, perfect pomp fading with the afternoon heat on the course, and he brushed a piece of it out of his eyes. “Steve, you remember that time your fever got so high I carried you to the bath?” The image threw him for a loop but he did, in full color.  
  
“Yeah. You got in with me,” he remembered. “Ruined that pair of trousers, you griped about it for a solid week.” Bucky nodded and took a deep breath, about to dive under.  
  
“Yeah,” he said. “I did. We just sat together in the water trying to keep you from passing out and I cried so hard---”  
  
“Buck,” Steve rolled his eyes. “The fever broke. It was fine---”  
  
“Eventually it broke. _Eventually_." Bucky felt the old anger rising, hitting the wall that Steve had constructed with purposeful oblivion in the past few months, the wall he couldn't seem to bring down. He felt his teeth start to set and he took another breath. "Steve, this is exactly what I mean. Don’t write it off for a second, don’t be a goddamn punk. God, how many times I thought I was going to lose you,” he steamrolled. "You remember it differently, that's fine. But it just got worse and worse and it broke.” Steve didn’t quite know what to make of it, but Bucky was talking, and he was determined, now, to listen.  
  
“I always bounced back,” he offered. "Didn't I?" Bucky shut his eyes.  
  
“Yeah. I didn’t.”  
  
“...sorry, what?” Steve knew this was working its way toward some kind of solution but couldn’t see it yet. The air always felt this heavy when they were bending gravity to help each other through something hard: when Buck lost his job, when Mrs. Rogers died that sudden night, when the choice was between food and medicine and a roof. But the words didn’t land and he couldn't see ahead. Bucky cleared his throat.  
  
“I broke. I was the one that broke, is what I’m saying.” He couldn’t figure out why Steve wasn’t following. Jarvis had made it so clear to him. He must have missed a step. “Did you hear me? I'm apologizing, here. I didn't handle this well."  
  
“I heard you. What is the metaphor supposed to be?” Steve asked, the corner of his mouth quirking just a hair and Bucky glaring him dead on.  
  
“I don’t write my own material for a reason, goddamn. Give me a chance, here, Stevie.” Steve chuckled in spite of him. There was the seed of an old joke that he liked so much; Bucky could volley just fine in an improvised bit but on his own, his tongue tied tight. _If it weren't for sheet music and kisses, his mouth would be useless_ , was one of Steve's favorite, secret punchlines. Fondness washed over him, but Bucky continued to glare. He swallowed his smile, then.  
  
“I’m just--- go ahead. I’m sorry. I want to listen to you, I’m just nervous you might say something I’m not gonna like.”  
  
“You’re nervous?” Bucky was incredulous. “Last time we talked, you dropped a goddamn bomb. You told me you wanted to die, and I just--- broke, Steve, I don't know, I shut down. The whole thing rattled me and I forgot who I was for a second, I must have, 'cause I promised I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, and---” Steve cut him off suddenly, but not because he understood.   
  
“You didn’t. You always took good care of me. I was an idiot, I didn’t take care of myself. You’re the best friend a guy could ask for! I’d be dead a _dozen_ times if it weren’t for you, Buck.” That was true, and Bucky acknowledged it, but he felt he wasn’t getting through. He started knocking on the fountain counter anxiously.  
  
“Why is it you can’t understand why I’m goddamn _desperate_ to keep you from making it thirteen?” Bucky was saying something else, he knew, but Steve wasn’t hearing it. He looked back at him and something inside felt it was losing ground. He shook his head. The photo he would carry with him to the very end, that velvet blue night captured in a newsprint ink from a Christmas wish they both made, was still carefully folded in the pocket of his slacks. It burned a hole there, waiting for the glorious happy ending to a fairy tale he messed up years ago in the gallery of St. Edward's before the eyes of God Himself. And maybe, when he got to the gates, he could trade in a soul made righteous, and put in a good word for another one. There were so many reasons to go, so many strange questions with answers that pointed to the battlefield. Why did this voice speak the loudest? _It might as well be me. What difference would it make? What's my life over the rest? What's my life against a good one?_  
  
"Thirteen is the lucky number, Buck," Steve challenged now. "It might as well be me. It's so much bigger than--- I kept trying to tell you.”  
  
“It _is_! It really is, Steve. What do I have to do to show you?” Bucky reached for him and Steve twitched, moving away. The shock wave from it shook the room.  
  
“Stop that. You can’t do that here, we can’t--- it’s just another mess for Jarvis to clean up. There’s always someone watching.” Steve looked away and Bucky could not, blinking a confusion now disgust.   
  
"Who? _God_? Fuck that guy, Steve, if He's busy getting mad at me for kissing your ugly face when He should be taking care of all those kids jumping out of planes. All of a sudden you're worried about God? We made our peace with that," Bucky said, dismayed. "I thought we did. Why do you want to die? Steve? It's a death wish, call a spade a spade. Is that---?"  
  
“No, it’s--- I don’t know. I don't want--- Really, I don't know," Steve stammered, his own wants twisting with words he thought he ought to say but didn't want to tell. "I feel like I'm always thinking about it, and that's not the whole thing, I just--- do you know what the worst thing that crossed my mind was, when we were out there?” Steve felt a strange free fall now, as Bucky searched his eyes wildly, wanting to hold him and instead holding himself back. “I thought, if I died just then, I’d be a hero: everything forgiven. The rumors would die with me, and you’d be totally free from all of this---” The words sounded strange, suddenly alarming. The voice that spoke to him, so loud, was a monster's he'd never confronted out loud. But his best friend was shaking now, not with anxiety but rage. He tried to compose himself, to find nicer, neater words, and couldn’t. Steve swallowed. "Maybe we both broke."  
  
“By ‘all of this’ do you mean _you_? You're taking _you_ out of the equation?” Bucky asked, no longer mocking, or angry, or righteously loving, but decisively curious.   
  
“None of it’s like we thought. We have to be too careful, Bucky. War or not. You know that's true." Steve wilted, the smallest version of himself left with no light shining through.   
  
“Then we go back." Bucky leveled. "We drop it, and we go back. I’d go in a heartbeat. Steve," he panicked, "we can always leave. There are so many ways out besides---”  
  
“No." There was a cold resolution in his eyes. Steve shook his head. "We worked too hard. You worked too hard for that.”  
  
“We don't need this!" Bucky couldn't help the tone of his voice anymore, and the distress poured out in volume. "Hey!" His eyes lit suddenly. "You remember what you said? We got here and we had an audition, on this same sound stage. What’d I say to you.” Bucky hopped off his seat and unconsciously started to explore the space, as they did in a new set, keeping his eyes on Steve like a perfectly rehearsed scene. Steve rolled his eyes. His fingers were itching, an old primal instinct to fight when he was exposed, and Bucky always had a way of demanding words instead of action. He acknowledged his cue.  
  
“You said, ‘don’t mess this up for us, Rogers.’”  
  
“Yeah. I was nervous. You weren’t. You said," Bucky hopped to a mark that would be Steve, "‘we’re already here together, the rest is gravy.’ Rolled right off your back like a goddamn duck." He hopped back to his spot, his Bucky position, and shifted his weight obviously. "I was so nervous! And you didn’t seem to care. But that’s what makes you good at this game, Rogers. You’re the total opposite. You care so much." He began to pace now, footfalls echoing in the space. "Your mind doesn’t go a brilliant mile a minute because you don’t care. You can spin circles around critics, and copiers, and me--- you spin circles around me and it makes me better, too. You always got me to care, to join your goddamn fights. I didn’t even go to your church!” Steve laughed then, soft and mirthless. Bucky wanted so badly to be clear. “But I believe you meant that. All this is gravy, and you never wanted that, not once in your life, so don't tell me we need it now. I don’t want to hear it even if it’s true, because that’s not you."

"Oh? And who am I, Buck?" Steve got up then, too, propelled. "Honestly, tell me. You told me not to decide I knew what was best for you, why do you get to make that call now, huh? You're the new God in town? Why are you the expert on what I need?”

"Because it used to be me!” Bucky exclaimed, and they both halted there. The silence afterward sank into the walls, rattled the years in the sundae dishes. “It used to be just me, Steve. We had nothing but I had you and you had me. That was it. For a while I thought it was still true and we were going to get back to normal any day, but it’s been crumbling since we got here. And now, God, I’m terrified, now you talk about it like the order of important things doesn’t include you or your feelings and so you’re just going to march out onto the field and die for something they say it’s okay to die for. Like it could change who you are.”  
  
“Bucky---”  
  
"Do you need me or don't you?"  
  
"That's not fair." Steve took a step back and Bucky took two forward.  
  
“When did I go wrong? Huh? I should have been telling you this every day. Okay. I get it now," he cried. "I'm fixing it. I'm never going to stop shouting it, then, until everybody knows and we can all go to sleep and stop fussing about it. I'll just shout it from the roof. I failed you, God, I _failed_ you if you don’t know: you’re the only good thing, Steve. You’re the _only_ thing worth fighting for. If you won’t, I will. Nobody, not Stark, not Hopper, not anybody in this country matters. Your God doesn't matter, and He can strike me down Himself. I don’t care. I’d hold your hand in front of the entire planet. I _promised_ you!” For all he was holding himself back he quaked with his whole heart and Steve continued to shake his head, stubborn.  
  
“You can’t say that, you have to think about your future, Buck.” He said it as his eyes welled, and he knew he didn't want it. They stood there on their old marks, this place where they tap danced to whistle solos with mops, where they ate strawberry ice cream for the very first time, where their eyes saw nothing but the other's while their dreams came true around them. But those were young, bright new stars. Here were two men, eyes sunk with nightmare and fear now that there was something so great to lose and so easily, commonly lost.   
  
“Listen, kid. Listen to me. If what you want, if what you _really_ _want_ in your heart is to go fight, you’re gonna fight. I know you better than that, I know you’ll go no matter what I say. But you always find a way to make me care when I’m scared to death, goddamn it. What I’m telling you is that I will not let you go without me. I will not live without you, you will not die without me. Promise me. Tell me that’s it. Til the end. That’s my future: yours.” Bucky was right up on him, then, words close enough to breathe their own heat on Steve's skin. He couldn't hear that voice telling him to hide, end it, hide, run, leave. He could only see Bucky's eyes, blue like a song on a hot clear night. The thunder of mortars quieted, the dust settled, the whispers hushed, and he remembered.  
  
“Okay." He said. "Okay, Buck.” His posture fell, and he swayed forward to rest his forehead on Bucky's shoulder. Bucky cautiously brought one hand to the back of his head, holding him close as he could dare with the air so sparked and tense.  
  
“That’s it? 'Okay?'" He asked. "My mouth is dry, I’ve been talkin’ so much, and you got ‘okay?’”   
  
“Just don’t say anything for a second,” Steve mumbled into his sweater vest. Bucky rocked on his heels.  
  
“Sure but---”  
  
“Shh.” They stood there for a moment, or several, and the room fell back to earth only gently after what seemed like months of wondering, hurting, quiet. Bucky rested his own head against Steve's.   
  
“...this is harder than I thought. Say something, huh? Do you really want to go?" He asked. Steve heard his own voice, and no other, answer.  
  
"I want to go home," he said. Bucky nodded.  
  
"Then we're going home."


	7. An Epilogue

Howard Stark didn't like to get his news from the papers. By the time print found him, it was already old news and too late to edit, and he was the final word on edits if he had his way, and he _ought_ to have his way, damn it, his name wasn't on all the letterheads just to look pretty. That having been said, he drank up other studios' gossip like mother's milk. It wasn't even to have a sense of superiority: he wanted to know what mistakes and pitfalls to avoid, what preceded success, what made for a great front page. That last one he figured out this morning, at his own expense, under the headline ROGERS AND BARNES RETURNING TO BROADWAY ROOTS AFTER CROSS COUNTRY TOUR. He was three pages deep, wading through petty gossip that didn't remotely concern him (how he liked it best, as a matter of fact,) when he heard his door open and didn't bother to put the paper down.   
  
"Howard. Read any good news lately?" Steve Rogers's voice greeted him, unmistakable in its forced business tone.  
  
“How is it," Howard asked, apropos of nothing but continuing to read the paper, "that an ox of a fellow like Orson Welles gets classified 4-F with a veritable fruit basket of maladies I never heard of but some neighborhood string bean will get 1-A, shipped to Camp Lehigh the next day? European theater in a week? The people of America want to know.” He folded down the page and looked at Steve, who smiled with a brightness he hadn't seen on screen in a while.   
  
“Welles has asthma.”  
  
“So do you,” Howard pointed out. Steve shrugged.  
  
“That’s the genetic lottery for you, Stark. Luck of the draw. Or luck of the fixer," he said. Howard misread some impudence there. Steve looked fresh and fightworthy, and Howard sensed something of a challenge in the air.   
  
“Don’t think I need to remind you of all the good Jarvis does for this company that is currently feeding you, Rogers." Howard considered fondly that his desk was a picture opposite of Jarvis's, covered in memos and missives and notes from weeks before and for weeks ahead. Half of them, at least, were formal complaints filed about the tempestuous _Stars & Bars_ set. Howard sighed and rubbed a line of worry from his forehead. "Jarvis moved around a lot of trouble over the years. He's more a friend to you than anyone on the lot."  
  
"We're not friends?" Steve asked. Howard looked almost hurt by the very idea.   
  
"Look me in the eye after what I'm giving you and say we're not friends, Rogers." He was giving up his brightest stars for their own personal health and sanity, an honestly terrible business move, he recognized. Steve knew it, too.  
  
"It's a break, that's all. You have New York offices---"  
  
"Don't tell me about my New York offices, Rogers." Howard got up and stretched his arms over his head, the morning so long already. "I'm not worried about getting the best out of your contract, for God's sake. I know it's hard to believe that I care." Steve wanted to tell him for the fiftieth time that he appreciated the chance, the opportunity, all the things he always wanted but didn't need anymore. But he didn't need to say that, either. The gift he was given, unselfishly, was space. He had the wide open country to decide what mattered, to settle with God, and to mend. Most of all, Howard gave him Bucky, free and easy, his old and inimitable Bucky, and he was the only audience, he realized, that mattered.  
  
"You're a good man, Howard."  
  
"Let me know where I can cash that in, if you would. Stars & Bars is going to need all the help it can get." Using the footage they'd already compiled of Steve and Bucky, the editors and writers decided they could weave in a secondary plotline (starring, to her absolute joy, Angie as a WAAF) and dismiss the troublesome duo without losing much more daylight. Jarvis did more than his fair share of communicating between departments to make it happen. Howard figured he lost a good four night's sleep in the process. By the time the news hit the papers, the boys were packed, and Howard missed them already. "Can I ask just one prying, obvious question, kid?"  
  
"You've probably earned a few, sure," Steve replied.  
  
“What happened to you two when I sent you over? Are you going to be okay?” Howard asked, arms folded as he leaned into the desk with twice his weight in gravity. Steve still didn't know. If he'd known then, or now, or ever, why it felt so ugly and dark in his gut to think of the sacrifices made in the war, how they shone such a blinding light on all the things he hated about the life he chose and what it meant to be a righteous or good man, he might have saved some trouble somewhere along the line. As yet, the answer was only a very particular fire escape on a summer night. He shook his head.  
  
“Nothing happened, Stark.” Howard stared at him for a second.   
  
“Right. And what part of the nothing ripped you two peas out of the pod?”  
  
“Same part that brought us back together, I guess," Steve said. He didn't know, but he felt it. That was the best he could do. "You want to father figure at me a little longer or wish us luck? Long drive to the other coast, as I understand it. Even with all your damn bonds tour stops along the way.” Howard smiled in spite of himself. The mere idea of the car journey ahead of those two troublemakers made him jealous, and, to be honest, would make for an excellent film if Crosby & Hope didn't already have that market cornered. The bonds tour provided a perfect cover for a great escape.   
  
“Like you were going to do anything else in Kansas.” He pulled Steve into a tight hug. “You know the road won’t be any kinder than Hollywood, pal. And I don’t mean to say that critically. But you know how things are.” Steve nodded, and quieted the voice that hissed, _see? see? sinner, see?_ But Bucky's face smiled back at him from a poster behind Stark's desk.  
  
“We know," he said, and the strength surprised him. "But with my bad luck and his good looks we’re going to figure something out. Who doesn't love a family road trip?" He slid Howard the last of his paperwork, signed and sealed. Howard dropped it on the closest pile.  
  
"If you two are still speaking to each other by Chicago," he said seriously, "you can make it anywhere." Steve opened his mouth to thank him again but Howard cut him off, waving him away, gesturing to the door without letting affection betray him. "I got pictures to make, if you don't mind. Get outta here."  
  
When Steve shut the door behind him, Howard carefully folded the paper and put in in the bottom drawer of his desk, the most organized of them all. It was a newsprint archive of sorts; pieces dated back to his first mention in the entertainment section, his first lousy review, Peggy's first front page. The beginnings reminded him how far he'd come, and how to look forward. He re-read the day's headline fondly. Another beginning for Barnes and Rogers; God help them.   
  
He smiled, considering all the new problems he'd have to cook up for dear Jarvis in their absence. He supposed he might have to get creative.

* * *

The trouble with stars, Hollywood and otherwise, (that is, what becomes trouble,) is that you start to doubt yourself, looking up. No matter how hard and sweet your best intentions, you look and look and when you've spent a lifetime looking up to them one moment or another you realize you haven't seen even half of what they might be, who they've been, the brightest light they have - you might not even be capable of doing so. You look up at them long enough and you start to forget you're made of similar stuff, and every night they're winking back at you just as fierce, bright and afraid but only ever right at you. The universe never asked for anything more than that. What they say about you, who you are, is nothing. You're neither of you stars, or bones, or soldiers or children. You're together, sharing a sky.   
  
Summer drags its heavy feet across America, smothers Los Angeles and New York in equal misery. But the fever breaks at sunset, and settles just so. You can escape: in the cool of a theater, in the water on any and either coast, in the blue freedom of somebody else's midnight song meant just for you. You'll stick to your seat no matter what, but you don't have to get up if you don't want to. You can call that home, if it helps. And it will.   
  
"No. Too hot," Bucky croaked, throwing Steve's arm off his chest. "Absolutely not. Do not open until Christmas. Too hot. Not happening."  
  
Eventually, it will.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for time-travelling with me! If you enjoyed a glimpse at the Hollywood Canteen, you can read all about it and the fabulous goings-on there, or listen to a truly wonderful podcast exploration of its marvelous existence at [ You Must Remember This. ](http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/ymrt-27-star-wars-episode-i-bette-davis-and-the) Enjoy!
> 
> Steve and Bucky's relationship and styles are based on that of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, an infamous music and comedy duo known for the "Road" movies (The Road to Morocco, The Road to Rio, etc) and radio shows. Both were active in the war effort and did not get along as well off-screen as they did in front of the camera... some of my favorites, but be forewarned, period-typical racism and sexism abound in those pictures!


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